Brian Friel and Theodor W. Adorno: Essays on Two Modern Dialecticians 1803740736, 9781803740737

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Christa Velten-Mrowka, born in Limburg, Germany, taught English language and literature and philosophy at Senior Secondary Schools near Frankfurt a. M. In the 1960s she was a student of Adorno and Max Horkheimer at Frankfurt’s Goethe-University. A long-term member of IASIL she published essays on Brian Friel.

Christa Velten-Mrowka

ISBN 978-1-80374-073-7

Brian Friel and Theodor W. Adorno

This book discusses how from their different backgrounds and on different levels, the German philosopher, sociologist and musicologist,Theodor W. Adorno, (1903-1969) and the Irish playwright, Brian Friel,(1929-2015) came to the conclusion that the modern crisis rendered art’s affirmative essence, like all positivistic fixations, obsolete. Only a new conception of dialectics, based on the reciprocity of opposites, rather than on antitheses, is capable of healing modern dichotomies. Independent of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and Critical Theory, Friel is aware that with the processual character of life this requires of the artist in particular an attitude both critical and conciliatory and a persistent readiness to change. Reality is in need of possibility, its dialectic other. Uncertainty, in Friel’s Theatre of Hope and Despair is no longer a defect of our time, but a source of creation in art as well as in life.

Brian Friel and Theodor W. Adorno Essays on Two Modern Dialecticians Christa Velten-Mrowka

www.peterlang.com

Peter Lang

Brian Friel and Theodor W. Adorno

ThisThis bookbook discusses discusses howhow fromfrom theirtheir different different backgrounds backgrounds and and on diff onerent different levels, levels, the the German German philosopher, philosopher, sociologist sociologist and and musicologist,Theodor musicologist,Theodor W. Adorno, W. Adorno, (1903-1969) (1903-1969) and and the the IrishIrish playwright, playwright, Brian Brian Friel,(1929-2015) Friel,(1929-2015) came came to the to conclusion the conclusion thatthat the modern the modern crisiscrisis rendered rendered art’sart’s affirmative affirmative essence, essence, like like all positivistic all positivistic fixations, fixations, obsolete. obsolete. OnlyOnly a new a new conception conception of dialectics, of dialectics, based based on the on the reciprocity reciprocity of opposites, of opposites, rather rather thanthan on on antitheses, antitheses, is capable is capable of healing of healing modern modern dichotomies. dichotomies. Independent Independent of of Adorno’s Adorno’s Negative Negative Dialectics Dialectics and and Critical Critical Theory, Theory, FrielFriel is aware is aware thatthat withwith the the processual processual character character of life of this life this requires requires of the of the artistartist in particular in particular an attitude an attitude bothboth critical critical and and conciliatory conciliatory and and a persistent a persistent readiness readiness to to change. change. Reality Reality is in is need in need of possibility, of possibility, its dialectic its dialectic other. other. Uncertainty, Uncertainty, in in Friel’s Friel’s Theatre Theatre of Hope of Hope and and Despair Despair is noislonger no longer a defect a defect of our of time, our time, but but a source a source of creation of creation in art inas artwell as well as inaslife. in life.

Christa Christa Velten-Mrowka, Velten-Mrowka, bornborn in Limburg, in Limburg, Germany, Germany, taught taught English English language language and and literature literature and and philosophy philosophy at Senior at Senior Secondary Secondary Schools Schools nearnear Frankfurt Frankfurt a. M. a. M. In the In 1960s the 1960s she she was was a student a student of Adorno of Adorno and and MaxMax Horkheimer Horkheimer at Frankfurt’s at Frankfurt’s Goethe-University. Goethe-University. A long-term A long-term member member of of IASILIASIL she published she published essays essays on Brian on Brian Friel.Friel.

Christa Velten-Mrowka

Brian BrianFriel Frieland and Theodor TheodorW. W.Adorno Adorno Essays Essays on on Two Two Modern Modern Dialecticians Dialecticians Christa Christa Velten-Mrowka Velten-Mrowka

ISBN 978-1-80374-073-7

www.peterlang.com www.peterlang.com

PeterPeter LangLang

9781803740737_cvr_eu.indd All Pages

22-Sep-23 Peter Lang11:55:08

Brian Friel and Theodor W. Adorno

Brian Friel and Theodor W. Adorno Essays on Two Modern Dialecticians

Christa Velten-Mrowka

Peter Lang Lausanne • Berlin • Bruxelles • Chennai • New York • Oxford

Bibliographic information published by The German National Library. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the German National Bibliography; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Velten-Mrowka, Christa, 1943- author. Title: Brian Friel and Theodor W. Adorno : essays on two modern dialecticians / Christa Velten-Mrowka. Description: Oxford ; New York : Peter Lang, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023018705 (print) | LCCN 2023018706 (ebook) | ISBN 9781803740737 (paperback) | ISBN 9781803740744 (ebook) | ISBN 9781803740751 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Friel, Brian--Philosophy. | Friel, Brian--Criticism and interpretation. | Dialectic in literature. | Adorno, Theodor W., 1903-1969. | Dialectic. | LCGFT: Essays. Classification: LCC PR6056.R5 Z97 2023 (print) | LCC PR6056.R5 (ebook) | DDC 822/.914--dc23/eng/20230605 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023018705 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023018706

Cover design by Brian Melville† for Peter Lang Group AG ISBN   978-1-80374-073-7 (print) ISBN   978-1-80374-074-4 (ePDF) ISBN   978-1-80374-075-1 (ePUB) DOI   10.3726/b20444 © 2023 Peter Lang Group AG, Lausanne Published by Peter Lang Ltd, Oxford, United Kingdom [email protected] - www.peterlang.com Christa Velten-Mrowka has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work. All rights reserved. All parts of this publication are protected by copyright. Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution. This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming, and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems. This publication has been peer reviewed.

For Konstantinos

Contents

Acknowledgements ix Preface: Imagination and Reality Chapter 1 Brian Friel and Theodor W. Adorno: Two Modern Dialecticians Chapter 2 Metaphysical Experience and the Problem of Tradition

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33

Chapter 3 Brian Friel and Theodor W. Adorno: Utopia, Dialectics, and Performances 53 Chapter 4 ‘The Truth About Hedda Gabler’: Ibsen’s Play, Brian Friel’s ‘Version’, and Adorno’s Reflections

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Chapter 5 Brian Friel and Francis Bacon: Artistic Creation and Faith Healing Viewed in the Light of Negative Dialectics

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Bibliography 123 Index 127

Acknowledgements

My thanks to Prof. Emily Pine, UCD, for allowing my essay ‘Brian Friel and Theodor W. Adorno: Utopia, Dialectics and Performances’, first published in Irish University Review, 48/​2 (Autumn/​Winter 2018), to be included in this book. I am particularly grateful to Prof. Christopher Murray for his continuous interest in my work, his valuable critique and encouragement.

Preface: Imagination and Reality

‘The fact is a fiction’, the Irish writer and dramatist Brian Friel concludes in Self-​Portrait, referring to ‘a particular memory of a particular day’ in his childhood. What had stayed in his mind was a complete re-​invention of the actual facts, perhaps even their invention. Memory is ambiguous, merging distance with nearness, consciousness with the unconscious. When years later, Friel realized that his mind had transformed the reality of facts, he did not consider it an error, but recognized his fictive reality as his truth, as ‘a moment of complete happiness’.1 For Friel, this memory became the key to his artistic work. Like all authentic art, it changes objects of empirical reality in order to reveal their hidden truth often enough appearing as untruth. In a special way, Friel’s plays dramatize the fundamental essence of art, namely to give expression to the inexpressible. Some of Friel’s characters have magically experienced moments of fulfilment, others are borne by a more lasting sense of balance, but all this is prone to change. There are no finalities in Friel’s plays, with the exception of those characters, whose lives end by violence, or by suicide out of despair. As signs of totalizing thinking, be it by hate or despair, they deny the facts of reality their dialectical other, which is possibility. Friel’s dialectics renounces the positivity of verdicts. The open-​endedness of his plays leaves the conclusions to the audience, while at the same time the dramatist aims to provoke in them the fascination that will make them perceive a play’s truth. A culture cannot do without theatre, and yet theatre may not change a society. Even Friel’s early short story, significantly entitled ‘Among the Ruins’, only suggests the possibility that the young father watching his child immersed in a self-​invented play will transform his sudden sense of wholeness into an attitude that lastingly raises him above the narrow horizon of his daily routine.

1

Christopher Murray, ed., Brian Friel:  Essays, Diaries, Interviews  –​1964–​1999 (London/​New York: Faber & Faber, 1999), pp. 38–​39.

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Friel’s ‘The Theatre of Hope and Despair’2 is based on the dialectic unity of reality and possibility. Contrary to the traditional view of their contradictoriness by which the one reduces the other, their reciprocity means reconcilement. What makes Friel’s work so humane is than in his art, as well as in ordinary life, hope and despair are possibilities in one and the same character, whether they are realized, or not. It posits an aporia, which paradoxically offers an escape by being acknowledged. Only this is the basis for a new beginning, one of Friel’ central themes. In a child the sense of happiness that Friel recalls, is immediate, an immediacy which for adults is much more difficult to retrieve; and more incisive than in children is their awareness of the elusiveness of moments of cognition and inner fulfilment. The philosopher, cultural critic and musical artist, Theodor W. Adorno, characterizes such moments as ‘aesthetic experience’ which, as he says, ‘is not genuine experience unless it becomes philosophy’,3 that is, unless it becomes thought that affects our life. Conceiving the factual as inseparably interwoven with its invisible context, Adorno also defines aesthetic experience as ‘metaphysical experience’. The separation of matter from spirit, of creation from creator, is thus overcome; the responsibility for the world is with mankind alone. Adorno’s claim that ‘(t)he smallest intramundane traits would be of relevance to the absolute’4 concerns art, philosophical thinking, and social life, equally applies to Friel’s metaphysics, usually marked as his spirituality. The smallest details in a work of art contribute to the whole, which, however, can only mimetically reflect an ungraspable absolute. Friel’s protagonists are longing for self-​fulfilment and happiness, learning that it is obtainable as an elusive, though the more powerful experience of the mind. Yet being capable, or developing the capability of critically reflecting their situation, they are free to act within the uncertainty of life, guided by the utopia of happiness and peace. ‘Artworks would be powerless if they were no more 2 3 4

See Brian Friel, ‘The Theatre of Hope and Despair’, in Murray, Brian Friel, pp.  15–​24. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. by Robert Hullot-​Kentor (London:  The Athlone Press, 1999), p. 131. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. by E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 408.

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than longing, though there is no valid artwork without longing,’5 as Adorno holds. ‘The object of art’s longing’ is ‘the reality of what is not, which becomes metaphorical in art as remembrance.’6 What has never been cannot be remembered. In sensitive and thinking persons, in artists in particular, a child’s capacity for immediate fulfilment is brought back to consciousness, constructively to be dealt with in life. Restoring the fragment by making it part of a balanced constellation, frees the sensually graspable from being a reifiable entity and links it with its ungraspable truth. Therefore, Adorno has described art as ‘magic delivered from the lie of being truth’.7 ‘What would happiness be that was not measured by the immeasurable grief at what is?’8: Adorno’s question in Minima Moralia might as well have been posed by Friel, committed, in the first place, to the concerns of his troubled Ireland. ‘We are talking to ourselves as we must and if we are overheard in America or England, so much the better,’9 he said in an interview. The conflict in the North, where he was born, forced him and his family to settle in the Republic. Never acknowledging Partition, he lived close to the border, with both parts of Ireland also geographically in view. From there he could easily cross over to the North to resume his theatrical activities in the cultural centre of Derry. In the Republic, however, he observed with grief the decreasing interest in the establishment of an authentic national identity. A growing materialism had turned the Irish South into ‘a tenth-​rate image of America’,10 as Friel put it in 1970, whereas in the North the historical conflict between victor and defeated was culminating again, the radicals on both sides cementing the differences, instead of acknowledging the common features. In face to the raging violence, Friel and Belfast-​born actor Stephen Rea (1946–​) founded the Field Day Theatre Company. Inaugurated in Derry in 1980, it was joined

5 6 7 8 9 10

Ibid., p. 132. Ibid., p. 131. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia. Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. by E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2002), p. 222. Ibid., p. 200. Murray, Brian Friel, p. 86. Ibid., p. 27.

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by writers from both parts of Ireland.11 As Elmer Andrews writes in The Art of Brian Friel, ‘Field Day asks us to unlearn the Ireland that we know, the received ways of thinking about it and to learn new ones.’12 Although Field Day addressed a divided nation, the appeal still involves the totalizations in modernity. ‘If artworks exercise a practical effect at all’, Adorno had already stated in the 1960s, they do so ‘not by haranguing, but by the scarcely apprehensible transformation of consciousness’.13 Similar to the dialectics of Critical Theory, Friel saw a peaceful society reflected in the utopia of art which, as Adorno put it, ought to be a model for life. As a dramatist, Friel knew that this can be most effectively achieved through the mesmerizing power of a play. In 1994 Friel resigned from the co-​directorship of Field Day, this important, yet chancy enterprise. The idea of reconciliation, of healing a split society by appealing to the individual consciousness, continued to be fundamental to his entire work. Alluding to the ‘continual extinction of personality’,14 which T. S. Eliot with his important influence on Friel demands of an artist, Tony Corbett rightly calls Friel ‘a properly rigorous artist who scorns the idea that personality is relevant to understand his work’.15 This again corresponds to the Adornian view of the subject-​object relation with its ‘“dialectical” primacy or priority of the object’,16 based on the insight that objects exist without the subject, whereas the subject is both subject and object, viewing from within, and viewed from without. In order to understand an object, which means to see through its formal appearance, to suspect its superficial impression, the individual mind must go beyond itself, ‘sacrifice’ itself. It is a dialectical self-​extinction which, in Adorno’s theory creates identity through the 11

The playwright and novelist, Thomas Kilroy (1934–​), who joined the company later, was born in Co. Kilkenny. 12 Elmer Andrews, The Art of Brian Friel (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1995), p. 164. 13 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 243. 14 Frank Kermode, ed., Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot (London:  Faber & Faber, 1975), p. 40. 1 5 Tony Corbett, About Friel: The Playwright and his Work (London: Faber & Faber, 2006), p. XVI. 16 Quoted by Brian O’Connor in:  Brian O’Connor, ed., The Adorno Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 138.

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non-​identical: rather than losing itself, the subject gains from its cognition of the object’s inherent truth. It is art in particular which realizes this transforming experience through mimetic imitation, ‘the path that leads into the interior of things’.17 Friel himself, Friel speaks of the artist’s divining rod, and of exploring the remote corners of individual souls. Especially in Faith Healer he shows that the mediation between the subjective mind and the objective world cannot be absolute. As all indigent human beings, the artist-​healer is nevertheless liberated by surrendering himself to the defective world. He thereby confirms Adorno’s characterization of dialectics as ‘the self-​consciousness of the objective context of delusion; it does not mean to have escaped from that context. Its objective goal is to break out of the context from within.’18 In the context of re-​inventing and strengthening Irish national and cultural identity, Friel held the problem of tradition to be of central importance, acutely aware of its dual use. Although demanding a balanced relationship between past and present, between individual and society, it can also be restrictive and paralysing. True tradition dynamically informs individual and societal identity; the acknowledgement of its historicity renders it open to transformation, since what organically developed in the past may no longer serve the needs of the present. In Friel as in Adorno to whom tradition is equally important, the mediative and transformative character of tradition is opposed to what Adorno calls mythifying traditionalism.19 Myth, the repetition of the ever the same, blocks the idea of an other, and with that of possibility, life’s hopeful uncertainty, it ‘intellectually produce(s) what already exists anyway’.20 The utopia of happiness, which had Friel as a child imaginatively transform fact into fiction and fiction into fact, has its equivalent in epistemology. As artists and thinkers, both Adorno and Friel reject identifying 17 See: Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 126. 18 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 406. 19 See:  Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Über Tradition’, in Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft 1 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1977), pp. 310–​320. 20 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Resignation’, in Critical Models Interventions and Catchwords, trans. by Henry W. Pickford (New York:  Columbia University Press, 2005), pp. 292–​293.

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thinking in which the subjective mind, in delusive self-​absolutization, identifies the rationally graspable appearance with the thing in itself. Cognition, however, is only possible through open thinking, which ‘points beyond itself, (…) prior to all particular content’. This makes it ‘the force of resistance’, as Adorno points out in ‘Resignation’. ‘Thinking has sublimated the rage’, and just as thinking persons do not need to inflict rage upon themselves, they do ‘not wish to inflict it on others’. Therefore Adorno’s conception of happiness that he sees ‘dawning in the eye of the thinking person is the happiness of humanity’.21 Friel summarized the same idea with his assurance that ‘on a deep inner level, happiness is possible’.22 Adorno’s theories and critique are verified not only in Friel’s dramatic work but also by the modern paintings of Francis Bacon, whose interviews, entitled A Terrible Beauty (echoing W. B. Yeats’s self-​reflective poem Easter, 1916) had a significant influence on Friel’s dialectical view of the artist’s metaphorical healing powers. All thinkers and artists here in question, including Yeats, were concerned with physical violence, which they rejected, despite in some manner being involved in it. Bacon, for whom violence had a liberating function, portrayed the essence of persons he knew well and whom he appreciated, rather than depicting their photographic appearance, with the result that viewer usually mistake the portrays as images of violence. The inexpressible barbarism of the Holocaust radicalized Adorno’s thinking and ended his musical compositions. Initially hesitant to leave his country after the Nürnberg Racial Laws of 1935, he and his wife finally emigrated to the United States, where Max Horkheimer had relocated his Frankfurt Institute of Social Studies (founded in 1930 by the wheat merchant Felix Weil) to be associated with Columbia University, New York. Between 1942 and 1944, in their Californian domicile, Horkheimer and Adorno wrote their seminal work, Dialectic of Enlightenment.23 From different angles they explain why in European culture the positivity of 21 22

Ibid. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 82. The original, Ästhetische Theorie, was published posthumously by Suhrkamp in 1970. 23 Max Horheimer and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenemnt, trans. by John Cumming (London/​New York: Verso, 1997).

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identifying thought failed to establish justice and peace in the world. They showed that from its beginnings, human enlightenment and material progress were dialectically linked, with the domination of nature gradually entailing the exploitation of man by man. In this process, art has become more than the religious ritual that it initially was, while it preserved its conciliatoriness, it has become critical of society and even of itself. As Friel puts it in Give Me Your Answer, Do (1997), it has become a necessary uncertainty.24 With its persistent imagination of what is not, it still turns reality into possibility, resisting the common trend of cultural industry to pervert it into a cultural ‘good’. Referring to the twenty-​first century, the German philosopher and aesthetician, Gerhard Schweppenhäuser (1960–​) observes that the ‘(t)riumph of positivistic facts has undermined the legitimacy of the philosophical problem of truth’.25 The more necessary is its re-​thinking. ***

24 25

See Friel, Give Me Your Answer, Do (Loughcrew, Co. Meath: The Gallery Press), p. 79. Gerhard Schweppenhäuser, Adorno und die Folgen (Stuttgart:  Metzler Verlag, 2021), p. 8 (my translation).

Chapter 1

Brian Friel and Theodor W. Adorno: Two Modern Dialecticians

Contrary to the occasional encounters between Theodor W. Adorno and Samuel Beckett,1 Adorno and Brian Friel never met. Friel presumably knew about Critical Theory and its prominent representative, Adorno, but only during his very last years did he take a vivid interest in Adorno’s theories. To Adorno, on the other hand, the young Irish dramatist was entirely unknown. In 1964, when Friel had his breakthrough as a noted Irish playwright, Adorno, one generation Friel’s senior, was preoccupied with his consummate work, Negative Dialectics,2 published in 1966, only three years before his premature death. The lives of the playwright from Northern Ireland and the German philosopher, musicologist, composer, sociologist and cultural critic could not have been more different. And yet, albeit in different forms and under different circumstances, certain historical and biographical similarities influenced the thinking of each man in a similar way. In Adorno, political and racial repression in Nazi Germany, and the enforced personal and collective emigration created an up to then unknown sense of uncertainty. Friel in turn knew human dichotomy from the beginning, having grown up near the border that splits Ireland into North and South, reinforcing the separation between Catholics and Protestants, Gaelic and Anglo-​Saxon cultures and traditions, the socially and politically underprivileged and the privileged. In both the philosopher and the committed artist, the experience of division 1

2

As one of Adorno’s biographers reports, five personal meetings between Adorno and Beckett have been recorded:  in 1958, 1965 and 1968 in Paris; in 1961 in Frankfurt a. M. at Suhrkamp Publishing House; in 1967 in Berlin. See Stephan Müller-​Doohm, Adorno (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2003). In a letter to the present author.

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sharpened the innate human sense for unity tied to the question of how wholeness could be realized in a fundamentally broken world. Each arrived at the conclusion that a possible solution had to be aporetic in that it entailed further questions rather than giving definite answers. The solution would match the dynamics and conditionality of the problem, both being dependent on time and space. As the Adorno-​scholar, Albrecht Wellmer, observes, ‘Theodor W. Adorno, like no other, has sounded out cultural modernity with all its ambiguities.’3 Adorno abandoned his musical compositions after the Holocaust:  seeking inconceivable truth through conceivable argumentation he meant to avoid the positivity of artistic expression. Friel, however, successfully captured the dialectic of fractured existence and metaphysical wholeness in his plays –​plays that express truths by raising questions without giving answers. ‘The truth of discursive knowledge is unshrouded, and thus discursive knowledge does not have it; the knowledge that is art, has truth, but as something incommensurable with art,’4 as Adorno has described the dilemma. Quite in the sense of negative dialectics, Friel’s aesthetic motto, ‘to see the thing exactly as it is and then to create it anew’5 is not aimed at graspable results. Frank’s ‘rage for the absolute’ in Wonderful Tennessee (1993) is opposed to his resigned ‘acceptance of what is’.6 Friel’s personal stance, however, seems to be closer to Adorno’s demand of the critical analysis of existent reality for the sake of reconciliation. His ambiguous statement: ‘What is must be changeable if it is not to be all’7 turns reality into possibility, and possibility into reality. To both Adorno and Friel, the transformation of delusions and distortions into the cognition of truth 3 4 5 6 7

Albrecht Wellmer, ‘Wahrheit, Schein, Versöhnung’, in Lugwig von Friedeburg and Jürgen Habermas, eds, Adorno-​Konferenz 1983 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1983), p. 138 (my translation). Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. by Robert Hullot-​Kentor (London:  Athlone Press, 1999), p. 126. See Brian Friel, ‘Extracts from a Sporadic Diary’, in Christopher Murray, ed., Brian Friel: Essays, Diaries, Interviews –​1964–​1999 (London/​New York: Faber & Faber, 1999), p. 67. Brian Friel, Wonderful Tennessee (London/​Boston: Faber & Faber, 1993), p. 71. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. by E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 398.

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sets a new relation between the physical and the metaphysical. Defining his theatre as one of hope and despair, Friel confirms this innerworldliness without denying the absolute. Adorno has called this subversion of the traditional view ‘metaphysics at the time of its fall’.8 If ‘dialectics serves the end of reconcilement’,9 as Adorno holds, the freedom enabled by it cannot be imposed from without. Friel’s drama illustrates the Adornian insight that true liberation means ‘to break out of the delusive context from within’,10 in an infinite process of questionings, of self-​reflection and renewals.

Beginnings Born in 1903, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno grew up in the educated middle-​class of Frankfurt on the Main in an atmosphere of generosity and cosmopolitan openness. He was the only child of a respectable Frankfurt wine-​merchant who had left the Jewish community, and of a Roman Catholic mother of Corsican and German descent, a singer of opera and classical music. ‘Teddy’, as was his life-​long pet name, was brought up in the Protestant faith. Early on, the well-​protected, highly-​gifted child showed an inquisitive and analytical mind, paralleled by an extraordinary musicality. Already in his teens a brilliant pianist and publisher of musical critiques, he became deeply rooted in German and European culture and its classical foundations. While still a student at a humanistic secondary school in Frankfurt, he privately studied the philosophy of Immanuel Kant under the guidance of a family friend, the architect and intellectual Siegfried Krakauer. After his early graduation from secondary school, Adorno studied music, philosophy, psychology and sociology and received his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Frankfurt at the age of 21. Still undecided of whether to choose a career as a musicologist and musical artist, or as a philosopher, he spent a year in Vienna studying 8 9 10

Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 408. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., p. 406.

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composition with Alban Berg. In Vienna he met again the modern composer Arnold Schönberg, and the Marxist philosopher and literary critic Georg Lukács, with whose works he was already well acquainted. In 1931 Adorno habilitated on the Danish theologian and philosopher Kierkegaard (1813–​1855) under the mentorship of the Protestant theologian, Paul Tillich. In the same year he received a position as habilitated private lecturer (Privatdozent) at the University of Frankfurt. Brian Friel, in comparison, the son of a school principal and a Postmistress, grew up, with his five sisters, in the Northern Irish town of Omagh and in the city of Derry. Founded by St. Columba in the sixth century, Derry had become a British plantation a millennium later and subsequently remained a stronghold of the British Empire. The Anglo-​ Irish Treaty of 1921, which divides Ireland into an independent Republic and the British Province of Ulster, ended the Irish War of Independence, but it did not bring peace. When Friel was born in 1929, the political and social repression of Catholics in the North had become the status quo, yet subliminally the struggle for social and political justice, as well as for a united Ireland continued. For Friel, who had family roots on both sides of the border, the division was mentally inexistent. Although in 1967 he moved across Lough Foyle to live in the Irish Republic, he frequently crossed the border, observing the political developments and actively taking part, as for instance in the Civil Rights March of 1972 in Derry that ended with the death of thirteen unarmed citizens and entered Irish history as ‘Bloody Sunday’. Like many Catholics, the young Friel hoped for the realization of his role as mediator and peace-​maker in the service of the Roman Catholic Church. His initial studies for the priesthood, however, soon revealed to him that this was not the way to truth that he was seeking. He then spent a decade as a school teacher in the Derry area, publishing short stories and articles, before he decided to become a full-​time writer. His critical and creative mind, coupled with responsibility for, and loyalty to his native country had brought him closer to agnosticism than to Roman Catholic dogma and gave him the artistic freedom he needed as a dramatist for not even dogmatic religion could offer the experience of truth that comes from within the individual mind. Believing in the ungraspable absolute and the

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priest-​like, mediating function of an artist, Friel yet remained a practising Catholic. ‘(B)orn into a certainty that is cast-​iron and absolute’,11 Friel found his own ambiguous way to inner liberation as the continual search for truth which in all its changeability is unchanging.

Mediation Writing his autobiography would have run counter to Adorno’s central idea of non-​identity which excludes delusive and totalizing identifications.12 Brian Friel was equally averse to this direct form of self-​presentation. In 1972, when asked by the BBC for a self-​portrait, he agreed, though with the argument that ‘(e)ven a fragment of autobiography such as this is of necessity and by definition an exercise in exhibitionism, in exorcism, and in expiation.’13 As will be later referred to in more detail, both Friel and Adorno claim that mere factuality is truth-​concealing rather than truth-​revealing. Exploring the ‘secret corners’ in the minds of his protagonists, Friel avoids all fixed statements. Nietzsche, who considerably influenced modern twentieth-​century thought, refers to the ‘enigmatic depth’, the ‘infinity of the background’, the ‘hint to the unknown’, and the ‘inexplicable’ already in Aeschylean tragedy: ‘The clearest figure still had a comet’s tail attached to it,’14 he writes in The Birth of Tragedy. In the same metaphysical spirit, both the philosophical theorist and musicologist, Adorno, as much as the dramatic artist, Friel, interpret the world’s fragmentary condition in terms of a dialectic that negates negation without setting a position.15 Life as a 11 Murray, Brian Friel, p. 45. 1 2 Also see Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Gloss on Personality’, in Critical Models II: Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), pp. 161–​165. 13 Murray, Brian Friel, p. 37. 14 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music, trans. by Ian Johnston (Vancouver Island University). PDF p. 43. 15 See Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 406.

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continuous process is continuously in need of rebalancing. As mediations they waver between certainty and uncertainty, not only because of life’s infinite processuality, but also because of the contingency of the mediators themselves. The solution to the dilemma is again ambiguous; it lies in the responsibility of every individual that dialectically unites self and other, reality and imagination, emotion and rationality. ‘The imagination is the only conscience,’16 as Friel holds.

Home and Exile The Nazi regime forced Adorno to leave Germany. After his teaching licence had been withdrawn, he still refused to acknowledge that his life was in danger. He finally left for Oxford in 1934 and resumed his writing, though without teaching permission. He completed a second dissertation thesis that complied to the academic standards in Britain, but he soon followed Max Horkheimer’s invitation to participate in a research project in the United States. Horkheimer, one of Adorno’s former mentors at Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität, and director of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research (founded in 1923/​1924) had more realistically foreseen the Nazi terror and in time transferred the Institute first to Geneva, then to New York, where it was attached to Columbia University. As a musicologist, Adorno accepted work for the Princeton Radio Research Project directed by Paul F. Lazarsfeld. Much to his dissatisfaction, the activities consisted of the mere collection and categorization of facts, compensating the lack of critical analysis with writing scientific analyses as contributions to the Institute for Social Research. Throughout his twelve years of American exile Adorno, unlike many of his fellow emigrants, felt unable to adapt to the American way of life. In Los Angeles, since 1941 the new domicile of himself and his German wife, Gretel Karplus, he had a vital part in the intellectual life of what was called the German Colony, but although he circumspectively also obtained 16

Murray, Brian Friel, p. 68.

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the US citizenship besides his German one, he never assimilated to the American lifestyle. Like Horkheimer; Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht and other prominent representatives of German and European culture, Adorno remained an outsider in the United States as a European as well an intellectual. After the German defeat, ‘the Institute’ was re-​established in its former location. After several visits to Germany, Adorno finally returned to Frankfurt in 1951. Together with Max Horkheimer, who again directed the Institute for Social Research, Adorno dedicated himself to teaching democracy to a misguided, still widely authoritarian German population. As a member of a formerly colonized European people that for centuries had struggled to preserve its cultural identity, Brian Friel still witnessed Irish emigration as well as other colonial after-​effects within his native country. While in the Republic modernist developments endangered the formation of a sound cultural self-​awareness, the Catholic minority in the North was treated as second-​class citizens. Referring to his youth in Derry, Friel recalls living under the constant threat by his Protestant peers, which ‘leaves scars for the rest of one’s life’.17 His later move to Donegal with his wife and children was motivated by his wish to live in independent Ireland rather than being governed by Britain. ‘I’m still left with this very rigorous nationalism, as intense as it always was,’18 he asserts in an interview. As with Adorno, Friel’s sense of responsibility for his country as a whole19 never ceased. At the same time, the political conflict in the North and cultural erosion in the South created in him a growing sense of tension between loyalty to, and critique of his country. During ‘the Troubles’ of the 1970s, Friel experienced violent actions by the British government first-​hand in Derry, the city that had been his centre of life for almost three decades. Ten years later, in interview with Fintan O’Toole, he acknowledges a ‘sense of rootlessness and impermanence’, which even in the Irish Republic created in him the ambiguous feeling of being ‘at home and at the same time in exile.’20 In contrast to the enforced emigration of millions 1 7 18 19 20

‘Interview with Desmond Rushe’, in Murray, Brian Friel, p. 28. Murray, Brian Friel, p. 26. See Murray, Brian Friel, p. 113. Fintan O’Toole, ‘The Man from God Knows Where’, in Paul Delaney, ed., Brian Friel in Conversation (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2003), p. 169.

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of Irish since the Great Famine in the mid-​nineteenth century, emigration for Friel was primarily a condition of the mind. Friel’s realism was coupled with great imaginative capability, and his critical distance combined with empathic sensitivity. It rendered his childhood and youth not entirely unhappy. In 1960, ‘The Lighter Side of Life’,21 Friel’s first article of his weekly contributions to the Irish Independent, is focused on the young Friel’s endeavour to transform his ‘warehouse’ of ‘dull, embarrassing, uneasy memories’ into accounts that were ‘attractive’, or ‘hilarious’, or ‘respectable’.22 Summing up his youthful adventures in Derry he confesses: ‘… we were vandals. I know we had no civic sense whatsoever.’23 Clearly, Friel’s youth contrasts sharply with that of Adorno, the ‘spoilt young gentleman’,24 who grew up in the urban educated middle class, frequenting the theatre, operas and concerts and enjoying his contacts with cultural celebrities. Leo Löwenthal, a co-​founder of Critical Theory, member of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research and Adorno’s co-​exilant in the US recalls that it kept the young scholar in ‘a kind of naive ignorance of the real world’.25 For the young Friel, by contrast, the split world was defined by the enmity between British and Irish, Protestants and Catholics. Standing for repression and freedom, it later informed Friel’s conception of life beyond the limitations of nations and ideologies. Early on, Friel’s sense of reconcilement and happiness sharpened his imagination and made him highly susceptible to the dramatic and comic sides of ordinary life. There are experiences that he remembered throughout his life as moments of complete happiness, related to his annual summer holidays at his grandmother’s house in Glenties, across the border in County Donegal. Decades later, in his ‘Self-​Portrait’, he describes his memories of those days as ‘pellucid, as intense, as if they happened last week’.26 A particular memory reoccurs somewhat modified in Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964). It reveals Friel’s 21 22 23 24 2 5 26

Delaney, Brian Friel, p. 14. Ibid. Ibid., p. 17. Leo Löwenthal, ‘Erinnerungen an Theodor W. Adorno’, in von Friedeburg and Habermas, Adorno-​Konferenz 1983, p. 389 (my translation). Ibid., p. 390 (my translation). Murray, Brian Friel, p. 38.

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abiding idea of whole security and fulfilment as the ambivalent experience between reality and imagination, as irreality that is nevertheless real, in Adorno’s diction, ‘realized utopia’ as the memory of wholeness that both is and is not. That the young Gar, Friel’s protagonist in Philadelphia, remembers a scene of his youth when he and his father on their way home, ‘great spirits’, though ‘soaked to the skin’, are singing ‘against wind and weather’,27 is more than reality; it is his truth which will always tie him to Ireland. At the same time it is a metaphor for the longing for happiness and inner balance, for togetherness and mutual trust which will cure human afflictions in face of the incurable human condition.

Childhood and Place In his work Adorno recurrently refers to childhood as the most authentic, unadulterated stage in human life. In the final part of Negative Dialectics titled ‘Meditations on Metaphysics’, he observes that ‘(a)n unconscious knowledge whispers to the child what is repressed by civilized education.’ The strange fascination of children by ‘the somatic, unmeaningful stratums of life might be closer to absolute knowledge than Hegel’s chapter in which readers are promised such knowledge only to have it withheld with a superior mien’.28 From a comparable point of view Friel, in ‘Self-​Portrait’, expresses his deep aversion to an education misunderstood as the force-​feeding of students with information,29 irreverent of their individual character, natural spontaneity and fantasy, defined by an Adorno scholar as a child’s ‘anarchic impulses for happiness.’30 In face of the barbarities of the Shoah, Adorno sees in the repression of such

27 28 29 30

Ibid. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 366. Murray, Brian Friel, p. 39. Albrecht Wellmer, ‘Wahrheit, Schein, Versöhnung’, in Friedeburg and Habermas, Adorno-​Konferenz, p. 140.

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impulses the main source of authoritarianism.31 With reference to Freud, particularly his Civilization and its Discontents (first published in German in 1930) Adorno holds that ‘repression of the natural human instincts instead of their sublimation will erupt in life as ‘absolute evil’32 (emphasis by me). The transcending experience of metaphysical happiness prevents the mind from objectifications that are reifying and totalizing. Instead, they unite rationality with emotion which, etymologically related to movement, empowers life and links subject with object. For Friel, as for his fellow Ulsterman and friend Seamus Heaney,33 and likewise for Adorno, the consciously or unconsciously desired condition of wholeness means at-​homeness, a sense of belonging; ‘the desiderium nostrorum –​the need for our own’,34 as Hugh in Translations remembers the words from Virgil’s Aeneid, comprises the individual in its context of community and nation, of place, language, and tradition –​a context in persistent need of revision. Still under the impression of his exile, Adorno writes that for those who no longer have a homeland, even writing can become a place to live.35 Decades after his return to Germany he confessed: ‘I simply wanted to go back to the place of my childhood, where what is specifically mine was imparted to the very core. Perhaps I sensed that whatever one accomplishes in life is little other than the attempt to regain childhood.’36 In his memories, all negativities had faded away. While Friel himself had experienced that the place central to one’s life could also be ‘a place of great stress and great alienation’,37 Adorno had yet to learn that even places like his beloved Amorbach, once thought to be ‘something absolute, unique See Theodor. W. Adorno et al., The Authoritarian Personality (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950). 32 Ibid., p. 365. 33 See Seamus Heaney, ‘The Sense of Place’, in Preoccupations –​Selected Prose 1968–​ 1978 (London/​Boston: Faber & Faber, 1980). 34 Brian Friel, Translations, in Plays 1 (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), p. 445. 35 See: Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. by E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2002), p. 87. 36 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On the Question:  “What Is German?”’, in Critical Models:  Interventions and Catchwords, trans. by Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), pp. 209–​210. 3 7 Murray, Brian Friel, p. 106. 31

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and inexchangeable’, may be ‘not so unique after all.’38 Even so, this place in the Odenwald mountains, the traditional summer resort of his parents, remained a decisive factor in the formation of Adorno’s self-​identity. From the perspective of ‘damaged life’39 after the great disasters of the twentieth century, Adorno still expressed his lasting love for this place in an article simply titled ‘Amorbach’.40 To him it was –​to put it with Heaney’s metaphor –​a place of ‘equal marriage between the geographical country and the country of the mind.’41 Both the aesthetician and philosophical theorist Adorno, and the dramatist Friel, were informed by the idea of an ideal constellation of nature, culture, family, nation, and individual self; and although this utopia has yet to materialize, it remained a life-​long inspiration in Friel’s and Adorno’s constructive respective battles against mental blindness and calcification, and against barbarisms of all sorts. Amorbach’s baroque buildings and half-​timbered houses, the parks and lake, the old smithy still in use had given the young Teddy the impression that the world was intact; the sounds of the ferry across the river Main, ‘that archaic vehicle’,42 assured him that ‘for millenniums they had been the same’.43 Particular landmarks around Amorbach, like ‘Siegfried’s Well’, transported the ten-​year-​old Adorno into the world of the Germanic saga Die Nibelungen, others reminded him of the great Peoples’ Migrations in the Europe of the early Middle Ages. The boy’s ‘passion for music and the theatre’44 not only roused the attention of a local painter and stage designer for Richard Wagner’s Opera House in Bayreuth, but also introduced him to singers of the Bayreuth Festspiel Ensemble holidaying in Amorbach. ‘I immediately felt accepted into the world of adults and in the world of dreams, still ignorant of how mutually irreconcilable they are’,45 Adorno 38 Theodor W. Adorno, Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I:  Prismen. Ohne Leitbild (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1977), p. 305 (my translation). 39 Adorno, Minima Moralia. 40 Adorno, Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I, pp. 302–​309. 41 Heaney, Preoccupations, p. 133. 42 Adorno, Kulturkritik, p. 303 (my translation). 43 Ibid. (my translation). 44 Ibid. (my translation). 45 Ibid. (my translation).

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writes in retrospect. And yet, ‘(m)y little town had protected me so well that it prepared me for the encounters with even its complete opposites.’46 Brian Friel’s ‘little town’, the Ballybeg of his plays, ’has at least some roots’ in Glenties,47 as it is stated in a feature on the author and Field Day by Radio Telefís Éireann in 1983; and Friel, too, is conscious of the ambivalence of the place that he once considered impeccable. Similar to Adorno’s idea of utopia, Friel’s sacred space of happiness and wholeness is ungraspably located in the mind. Transforming it into art gives him the possibility of sharing it with his audience, while the aesthetic experience of each of its members will be the same and yet different. In spite of its characteristic uncertainty, utopia as imagination or mental experience can be objectified by being expressed. Imagination is neither unsubstantial fantasy nor positivistic identification. In that it figures a better world, it reconciles fact with fiction: the mere fact is placed in an immense and indefinite context of possibility, which may turn fiction into fact. Facts, in turn, do not exist in themselves, but are part of contingent life. As their context changes, they, too must change, which interrelates them with creative fiction. Adorno’s memory of the actual ferry across the Main which he associates with an unstained and steady course of human history calls to mind Friel’s undelusive view of the mythical ferryman, Carlin, in Wonderful Tennessee (1993) who is expected to take the six characters from their broken world to Oilean Draiochta. But the Carlins, having ‘been ferry people for thousands of years’,48 no longer transfer people to the enchanted island of the imagination; they leave them on their troubled terra ferma, either endlessly longing for a place of peace and happiness, or rediscovering it in 46 Ibid., p. 304 (my translation). Also see Thoman Mann, Doctor Faustus (written in American exile and with regard to the presentation of the Twelf-​Tone-​Technique was assisted by Adorno): ‘For the artist may all his life remain closer, not to say truer, to his childhood than the man trained for practical life, although one may say that he, unlike the latter, abides in the dreamy, purely human and playfully childlike state, yet his path out of his simple, unaffected beginnings to the undevined later stages of his course is endlessly farther, wilder, more shattering to watch than that of the ordinary citizen. With the latter, too, the thought that he was once a child is not nearly so full of tears.’ 47 Delaney, Brian Friel in Conversation, p. 182. 48 Friel, Wonderful Tennessee, p. 24.

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themselves. Friel presents the challenge of an unfulfilled, urbanized modern generation as a question and request that may or may not be answered, but that in any case demands of his recipient audience self-​questioning and truth-​seeking.

The Border: Paradigm of Dialectics For Friel, the border that divides Ireland politically, socially and religiously, is also significant in a metaphysical sense. ‘Termon, from Terminus, the God of boundaries’,49 as in Translations Yolland, the English soldier idealistically Irish at heart, remarks, is ambivalent, he includes rather than excludes. The informed spectator recalls the existent village of Termon in northern Donegal, the ancient history of which suggests security and wholeness, not division: in Celtic mythology, An Tearmann signified refuge, sanctuary, a sacred place. In Friel’s play, however, the role of Termon, god of boundaries, is perverted; border has become the signature and source of human estrangement, enmity, violence and death. As a Roman god, Terminus was a tutelage deity conceived as a bilateral figure, since he observed the situation both without and within the city walls. His prime function, however, was to safeguard justice and peace within the territory: the threat from within was generally considered more dangerous than the threat from without. Terminus later becomes Janus with an extended and more mediative function as the guardian of doors and gates, exits and entrances, of endings and beginnings, past and future. Arguably, his bilaterality anticipates the simultaneity, if not the reciprocity, a central conception of modern dialectics. Already St. Augustine, in the seventh chapter of Book VII of De Civitate Dei –​a text, with which Friel as a former student at the Theological Seminary at Maynooth must have been familiar –​discusses the question of whether the distinction between Janus and Terminus as two separate godheads was justified. Overlooking opposite territories, Janus simultaneously divides and mediates in that he 49

Brian Friel, Selected Plays (London: Faber & Faber, 1990), p. 418.

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allows for the transition of one sphere into the other. As the protector of, and mediator between two realms, this Roman deity has an Irish correspondence in the Celtic deity on Boa Island in County Fermanagh. The mythical Oilean na mBeo, the island of the living, merges with Tir na nÓg, the Otherworld, land of eternal youth. Being more than a dead relic from a mythical past, the double-​faced statue in Northern Ireland today is a timeless reminder that true identity always includes its opposite and that therefore the cognition of truth is possible only as the reconciliation between contradictions. According to Adorno, it is realizeable as ‘togetherness of diversity’, the mind being ‘above identity and above contradiction’.50 Translations dramatically makes clear that as absolutes, the alternatives ‘unity or division, love or hate’ can only lead to disaster. Like all balances, unity and love are permanently jeopardized; but neither are antagonisms finalities: Translations leaves Yolland’s assumed murder by Irish radicals uncertified. Unlike the faith healer, Frank Hardy, and the composer Leoš Janácek in Performances (2003), Molly Sweeney (1996) need not die in order to reach a state beyond hope and despair. Realistically and metaphorically, her final station of life is the hospital, yet for her the place of sickness is irrelevant: after she passed years of blindness that made her see, she recognized the actual blindness of the seeing. ‘Blindsighted’ she has now reached her ‘borderline country’, the sphere of higher knowledge that enables her to look upon the world ‘from the standpoint of redemption,’51 which does not make her feel happy but, after all, ‘at ease’.52 Also for Adorno, freedom meant to adhere neither to one thing nor to the other. Again recalling his childhood, he tells of particularly joyful sensations of freedom, which paved the way to his later dialectic theory. When on holiday in Amorbach, he loved to hang out in what he calls the ‘no-​man’s-​land’ between the two lines of poles that marked the border between the German territories of Baden and Bavaria. But rather than priding himself of occupying a ‘no-​man’s-​land’, he felt exalted by the fact 50 51 52

Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 150. Brian Friel, Molly Sweeney (1994), in Brian Friel, ed., Plays 2, introduced by Christopher Murray (London: Faber & Faber, 1999), p. 509. Friel, Molly Sweeney, p. 509.

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of having escaped the confinements of either territory.53 Later he would write in Negative Dialectics: ‘As long as the world is at it is, all pictures of reconciliation, peace, and quiet resemble the picture of death. The slightest difference between nothingness and coming to rest would be the haven of hope, the no man’s land between the border posts of being and nothingness.’54 For a few moments, art has the power to provide such moments.

The American Experience Both Adorno and Friel crossed the Atlantic for the first time in their mid-​thirties, though under very different circumstances, for different reasons and in different historical epochs, and to each one in his own way, America meant liberation. What for Adorno were twelve years of life-​saving exile (1938–​1949), for Friel was a stimulating escape, his ‘first parole from inbred claustrophobic Ireland’,55 which assured him of his capacities as a dramatic artist. Adorno escaped physical extinction, Friel spiritual constraint, while new experiences, the encounter with a mentality and culture so distinguished from their own, led to insights that informed the work of each. In 1963 Friel had spent several months in Minneapolis to observe the theatre techniques of Tyrone Guthrie, theatre director, actor, playwright and head of the Guthrie Theatre newly founded by him. Although Friel had already written a few plays for the theatre and radio, besides having short stories and articles published in The New Yorker and the Irish Press, he describes himself as ‘totally ignorant of the mechanics of play-​writing and play-​production apart from an intuitive knowledge’.56 During this ‘most important period’ that Friel ‘had ever experienced’57 (an assessment 5 3 54 55 56 57

Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Amorbach’, in Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I, p. 305. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 381. Murray, Brian Friel, p. 42. Ibid. Ibid.

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he later revised) he gained the knowledge of what it is that makes a true playwright: ‘I learned, in Guthrie’s words, that the theatre is an attempt to create something which will, if only for a brief moment, transport a few fellow travellers on our strange, amusing, perilous journey –​a lift, but not, I hope, an uplift’ (emphasis by me).58 To this statement, made in a BBC transmission in 1966, he later added in ‘Self-​Portrait’: ‘I learned a great deal about the iron discipline of theatre, and I discovered a dedication and a nobility and a selflessness that one associates with a theoretical priesthood.’59 Defying uncritical subjection to conventional thinking and norms, Friel’s aim was to enlighten the members of his audience about themselves and their objective situation not by rational argumentation, but by capturing their emotions so that their own conclusions might lead them to a change of reality. In the decades that followed, Friel, now an internationally acclaimed playwright, travelled to the United States, mostly to attend productions of his plays. Yet already in a 1970 interview he admits: ‘I don’t like America at all. When I went there first I was very enamoured of it. But this left me very rapidly. Now I dislike it very much.’60 While Friel appreciated the generosity of the American people, he remained critical of the materialist and commercialized culture in the United States, which to his observation had an erosive influence on European culture, and on his native Ireland in particular. His critique was primarily directed at Dublin’s urban society. As the ‘cultural and political vanguard’ of the American way of life he sees it in stark contrast to rural Ireland that still in the 1970s was ‘in complete isolation’. Here, too, the dialectician Friel pleads for true cultural and national identity through the ‘mutual balance’61 between the urban and rural population. The reciprocity of preservation and renewal would enable Ireland’s creative, open-​ended historical process. Neither denying its past, nor in Romantic mythifications, Ireland would be a nation conscious of its roots and working for a just and peaceful future.

58 59 60 61

Delaney, Brian Friel, p. 39. Murray, Brian Friel, p. 42. Murray, Brian Friel, p. 34. Ibid.

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Unlike many of his European co-​exilants, Adorno, ‘a European from first to last’,62 found it extremely difficult to bring authenticity and adaptation to the American mentality into balance. After his twelve years of exile, when asked to note down his memories of that time, he wrote: ‘Both my natural disposition and my past made me inconceivably unsuited for adjusting in matters of intellect and spirit.’63 At the same time he knew that individuality develops from ‘a process of adjustment and socialization’,64 which requires the capacity for self-​reflection and self-​transcendence. Stephan Müller-​Doohm, one of Adorno’s biographers, points out that Adorno transformed his subjective experience of social and intellectual exclusion into a perspective of knowledge, and that the sense of being a foreigner heightened his critical sensibility and sharpened his political awareness.65 The ambivalent situation of simultaneously being within and without a society and its culture66 must have been a further stimulant to the formation of Adorno’s dialectic theory. Emigration radicalized Adorno’s thinking, as the expert on Critical Theory, Martin Jay, claims.67 Yet notwithstanding Adorno’s critique of America’s pragmatism and capitalism and pragmatism, he also emphasizes the illuminating and enriching aspects of his American experience. Like Friel, he praises the generosity of the American people, in which he recognizes ‘the potential for real humanitarianism’;68 nor will Adorno ever ‘neglect what as a scholar (he) learned in and from America’.69 It ‘liberated’ him ‘from a naive belief in culture’ and taught him to ‘assess culture as such in a new way –​that is, 62 63

Ibid. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America’, in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. by Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 215. First published in: Perspectives in American History, Vol. II (Harvard University, 1968). 64 Ibid. 65 See Richard Klein, Johann Kreuzer and Stefan Müller-​Doohm, eds, Adorno Handbuch (Berlin: J.b. Metzler, 2019), p. 5. 6 Ibid. 6 67 See Martin Jay, ‘Adorno in Amerika’, in von Friedeburg and Habermas, Adorno-​ Konferenz 1983, p. 359. 8 Adorno, Critical Models, p. 240. 6 69 Ibid., p. 242.

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to recognize a mode of living in which spirit was not of absolute importance.70 Even more important to him was the ‘experience of the substantiality of democratic forms: (…) in America they had seeped into life itself, whereas in Germany they were (…) nothing more than formal rules of the game.’71 In America Adorno ‘experienced for the first time the importance of what is called empiria, though from youth onward I was guided by the awareness that fruitful theoretical knowledge is impossible except in the closest contact with the materials.’ But, like Friel being conscious of the qualitative difference between experience and empiricism, Adorno saw his task in the restitution of experience ‘against its empiricist deformation.’72 Both Adorno and Friel returned to their native countries enriched and inspired; their critical sense was sharpened not solely politically and culturally, but also epistemologically. They committed themselves to the revelation of truth –​through philosophical and aesthetic theory the one, the other through the nonconceptual, mimetic language of art. Their objective was the same: to ‘unseal’ what is behind mere concepts and facts: the unknown, forgotten, suppressed, repressed, and estranged. Adorno sees in philosophy and art the two forms of knowledge that compensate each other: ‘The truth of discursive knowledge is unshrouded, and thus discursive knowledge does not have it; the knowledge that is art, has truth, but as something incommensurable with art.’73 Like Adorno, Friel was conscious that the truth he hoped to convey, could only be the mimesis of the absolute.

7 0 See ibid., p. 239. 71 Ibid., pp. 239/​240. Nevertheless, with his thorough knowledge of Freud’s psychoanalysis, and under the impression of fascism, especially of German Nazism, Adorno assumed that even America was not ‘somehow immune to the danger of veering toward totalitarian forms of domination’. 72 Ibid., p. 242. 73 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 126.

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Culture and Critique With Philadelphia, Here I Come! (1964), Friel’s first play after his stay of three months in Minneapolis as an ‘observer’ at the Guthrie Theater, he achieved his artistic breakthrough as an acknowledged Irish playwright. Adorno by contrast, unable to continue his musical compositions after the Holocaust,74 was beset with a survivor’s sense of guilt for lacking solidarity with the millions of murder victims, while on the one hand, he naturally held feelings of gratitude for having been saved from the death camps. Above all, he was deeply shocked at the insight that human enlightenment, especially the so-​called eighteenth-​century Age of Enlightenment, had paradoxically led to an eclipse of reason,75 and that progress was always coupled with regression as its definite negation. ‘All post-​Auschwitz culture (…) is trash’,76 Adorno controversially proclaimed after the war; later he mitigated its radicality to some degree. Yet the idea that ‘Auschwitz irrefutably demonstrated that culture has failed’77 is fundamental in Adorno’s work during and after the Second World War. The shock also made him revise Marx’s utopia of a liberated society. In 1956, in an extended discussion with Horkheimer on ‘a contemporary version of The Communist Manifesto’,78 Horkheimer clairvoyantly held that ‘(i)n the long run things cannot change. The possibility of regression is always there. That means we have to reject both Marxism and ontology. (…) We can expect nothing more from mankind than a more or less worn-​out version of the American system.’79 Adorno, despite the dialectic id progress 74 ‘That in the concentration camps it was no longer an individual who died, but a specimen … is bound to affect the dying of those who escaped the administrative measure’ (Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 362). 75 See Max Horkheimer’s The Eclipse of Reason, the Institute of Social Research, Columbia University, New York, 1947 Oxford University Press, republished in 2013 by Martino Publishing, Mansfield Center, CT. 76 Ibid., p. 367. 77 Ibid., p. 366. 78 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Towards a New Manifesto, trans. by Rodney Livingstone (London/​New York: Verso, 2011), p. X, Publisher’s note. 79 Ibid., p. 21.

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and regression, stuck to the idea of mediation and to the viability of ‘a completely unshackled reality’.80 Friel’s biography rendered his utterances on culture less controversial. With his confession ‘I don’t know what culture is, really’,81 he sums up the various conceptions of culture from the revival of ancient myths in order to restore a lost identity, to the pseudo-​cultural products of consumer industry. Culture is not ‘something explicit and homogeneous’,82 Friel replied to his interviewer who held a decidedly traditional view. According to his hedge school master in Translations, the assumed spirituality of the Irish is the counter-​reaction of a colonized people to its lack of material subsistence.83 It produces a rigid self-​assessment which runs counter to a reasonable assessment of the present: ‘We like to think we endure around truths immemorially.’84 Friel was equally critical of the American-​style ‘commercialized culture’ with mass productions for Television like Dynasty and Dallas.85 In the ‘mythology of consumerism’ he recognized the modern myth of the ‘American dream of success, of achievement, of fulfilment through materials’.86 It is a fake promise, a lie that keeps the masses enslaved by what Adorno rejects as ‘cultural industry’.87 Friel does not mean to degrade culture as such. His hesitance to define culture complies with his refusal to give positivistic answers ‘True culture,’ he says, depends on people’s ‘capacity to interpret the myth, (…) to dismantle it, (…) to find out what the relevance of that is to yourself but not to your Irishness.’88 In this he again corresponds with Adorno’s dynamic conception of culture, which involves the critical consciousness of the individual subject, aimed to realize truth in thought and practice. At the 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87

Ibid., pp.  20–​21. Murray, Brian Friel, p. 131. Ibid. Ibid. Friel, Translations, in Plays 1, p. 418. Murray, Brian Friel, p. 131. Ibid., p. 132. See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. by John Cumming (London: Verso, 1997). 88 Ibid., p. 132.

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same time, it depends on communication, of which Adorno says that ‘(c) ommunication with others crystallizes in the individual for whose existence they serve as media’.89 Communication as the basic element in Friel’s relates him to particularly to Anton Chekhov (1860–​1904), gaining him the title ‘the Irisch Chekhov’. Friel’s conception of culture shows several distinctive features of negative dialectics: interdependence of subject and object, of immanence and transcendence, and the critical, mediating and transformative role of the emancipated individual. Like Adorno, with his lasting influence on modern dialectic thought, Friel regards culture is an historical object, subjectively formed and reformed in interplay between individual and society. In a lecture on the differences between European, in particular German, Kultur and American ‘culture’, Adorno refers to the etymological root of ‘culture’: it derives from Latin ‘colere’, meaning ‘to take care of nature’, as it has survived in ‘agriculture’. Its element of control was soon extended from the organic to human nature to keep the irrational drives at bay so as to ensure an ordered social life. Finally, culture assumed the general meaning of ‘formation of reality’.90 Reality in turn means the dialectic of unity and diversity, simultaneously involving variety and change, as well as antagonisms and peaceful and constructive communication. Valid at least until the twentieth century, Adorno’s’ advice to the German people applied to all Europeans, namely that ‘we certainly can learn from Americans not to take for granted the circumstances into which we were born, not to take the culture in which we live as a natural given, but that we can learn from Americans a kind of freedom in dealing with the preconditions of our existence.’91 Yet at the same time, Adorno remains aware of the danger of standardization and conformity in a nation too much focused on material progress, pragmatism and perfection. To this, Friel certainly would have consented. When asked about the oppositional cultures in Translations, he agreed that the play ‘is about the absorption of one culture into another’, but that it should even go ‘a bit deeper than that’, that actually it was ‘about the 89 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 162. 90 See: Theodor W. Adorno, Vorträge 1949–​1968 (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2019), p. 156. 91 Ibid., p. 174 (my translation).

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disquiet between two aesthetics.92 With that he transcends the borderlines of nationality and addresses discrepancies that are universal, the ultimate arena being the private sphere of individual, which is also the place where new insights are attained. To absorb in oneself the good of the other that oneself is lacking; to dismiss the bad one sees in others and that one may recognize in oneself is a wisdom as old as the inscription over the entrance to the temple in Delphi. That true identity necessitates the non-​identical,93 and can only be realized in a state of inner and outer freedom. It is this sense of freedom which both Friel and Adorno intend to rouse in the minds of their audiences and public. Critique and reconciliation, reflection and self-​reflection, are the fundamental elements in their works. What Friel explicitly considers most important converges with the Adornian idea that cultures should try to overcome their ‘numbness’ towards critical thought, towards the dissolution of their reifications, and towards self-​inspection and self-​renewal.94 Therefore it is Friel’s aim ‘to forge a cultural identity for Ireland free of the influence of both London and the nationalist mythologies of the Republic’,95 as Matt Wolf quotes the playwright. ‘One need not deny the distinction between so-​called culture of spirit and a technological culture in order to rise above a stubborn contraposition of the two’,96 as Seamus Heaney confirms the reciprocity between matter and spirit, form and content: It is the precondition for the transformation of the discordance between cultures into constructive mutuality.

Stephen Dixon, ‘Mapping Cultural Imperialism’, in Delaney, Brian Friel, p. 134. See Negative Dialectics, p. 120. See Adorno, Vorträge, p. 176. Matt Wolf, ‘Brian Friel’s Ireland: Both Private and Political’, in Delaney, Brian Friel, p. 200. 96 Adorno, ‘On the Question’, p. 210. 9 2 93 94 95

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Commitment97 With the foundation of the Field Day Theatre Company Friel and his co-​ founder, Stephen Rea, hoped to set in motion a process towards free and peaceful communication between the Gaelic and Anglo-​Saxon cultures. As dramatic, respectively performing artists, they knew that their project could neither be purely intellectual nor could it be shallow amusement. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno holds that ‘(t)o be pleased means to say Yes’98 –​a consent to things as they are. Yet with Adorno’s high esteem of Samuel Beckett’s work,99 his thesis does not differ from the characteristic irony of Friel, who says ‘Yes’ that indicates ‘No’. Adorno’s radical statement is addressed to the ‘pleasure industry’, created for the masses to sustain the economic status quo. For the same reason, Friel has rejected the commerciality of Broadway Theatre mainly interested in profit-​making and applauding audiences. And like Adorno, he rejects tendentious plays for their attempts to superimpose authorial views and ideologies into the audience as, in Adorno’s words, they cannot work ‘at the level of fundamental attitudes’.100 However, the objective of the Field Day Theatre was to make people think for themselves, to draw their own conclusions from what they saw on stage, rather than to lecture them. Conscious that modern theatre goers ‘want to be engaged mentally’,101 Friel also knew that without capturing their emotions, his theatrical engagement would be inefficient. While aesthetic experience takes place in the individual, See Adorno’s essay ‘Commitment’ in:  Aesthetics and Politics:  Theodor Adorno-​ Walter Benjamin-​Ernst Bloch-​Bert Brecht-​Georg Lukács, no editor named (London/​ New York: Verso, 2010). 98 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, in Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 144. 99 Before his premature death in 1969, Adorno had intended to dedicate Aesthetic Theory to Beckett. 100 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Commitment’, in Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, Brecht, Lukács: Aesthetics and Politics, with an afterword by Fredric Jameson (London/​ New York: Verso, 2007), p. 180. 1 01 Murray, Brian Friel, p. 32.

97

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the dramatist seeks to communicate with the collective mind,102 to manipulate the audience as a whole by mesmerizing them,103 in the effort to reveal to them ‘a new “truth”’, instead of expecting ‘the confirmation of a false assumption’.104 Nevertheless, Friel was conscious that his work will ‘enrich or alter the lives of only a few’.105 In America, Friel had learned from Tyrone Guthrie that a play must not fail to entertain, but that entertainment does not mean the false depiction of reality as total harmony. His plays accordingly develop around the intertwinement of personal and historical crises as metaphysical crossroads where truth becomes a most challenging presence. As Seamus Heaney has pointed out, Friel’s ‘subversive intellect’ seeks ‘to unsettle pieties’,106 rather than to assuage, posing questions, but refraining from giving answers. Contrary to authorial intentions, subtle political implications underlie every true work of art. With regard to the Field Day project, Friel stated, ‘(w)e’re not talking in precise political terms at all. We’re talking about some kind of awareness (…), some kind of minute little adjusting attitudes.’107 And yet, every artistic balance between the real and the ideal, mimetically points to the possibility of its verification in real life and makes it political in the widest sense. Friel’s work radiates an aesthetics that, in the Adornian sense, views art as both a reflection of and a model for life, which makes it unobtrusively therapeutic in character. Beyond their high degree of entertainment, Friel’s plays testify to Adorno’s thesis that committed art ‘strips the magic from a work of art that is content to be a fetish, an idle pastime for those who would like to sleep through the deluge that threatens them, in an apoliticism that is in fact deeply political.’108

1 02 103 104 105 106 107 108

See ibid., p. 18. Murray, Brian Friel, p. 19. Murray, Brian Friel, p. 53. Ibid., p. 32. Delaney, Conversations, p. 224. Murray, Brian Friel, p. 102. Ibid., p. 177.

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Language and Identity Human consciousness is based on thought, expressible only through language, generally acknowledged as the central element of identity. Adorno points out that in emigration one’s ‘language has been expropriated, and the historical dimension that nourished (one’s) knowledge, sapped.109 Like any relation, the interrelation between language and identity, implies tension, whether it be supportive, or destructive. Subject to time and circumstance, both language and identity are subject to change, and yet they prescribe their roots. When in 1951, after several sporadic visits, Adorno ultimately returned to his native Frankfurt, he had reduced his Jewish family name, Wiesengrund, to its initial ‘W’, and assumed his mother’s Italian maiden name. As also in the United States refugees from Nazi Germany were generally unwelcome. Although he had additionally obtained American citizenship, he never denied his persistent homesickness. Friel, when asked in 1965 if he would like to live in America, uttered similar sentiments, saying that he would be ‘very lonely in the way a child is lonely’, that he would get ‘very nostalgic and very homesick’.110 Conscious also of the inseparable relation of identity and language, Friel may have shared Adorno’s ‘subjective need’ to return to his native country for the reason of language. While the philosopher Adorno cherished, on the one hand, a particular affinity to ‘the speculative element’ in the German language, Friel as literary artist and Irishman would have particularly understood Adorno’s chief argument that ‘one can never express one’s intention so exactly, with all the nuances and the rhythm of the train of thought in the newly acquired language as in one’s own.’111 This does not exclude the possibility of change. At the end of Translations, Friel’s hedge school master proclaims: ‘(i)t is not the historical past, the “facts” of history that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language. (…) We must never cease renewing those images; because once we do, 109 Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 33. 110 Ibid., p. 10. 111 Adorno, ‘On the Question’, p. 212.

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we fossilize.’112 Not only does it comply with Adorno’s dialectic theory of tradition and progress, but it is also in line with George Steiner’s subject of the complexity of language, put forth in After Babel (1975). Steiner’s deep influence on Friel has been widely discussed in literature on the playwright; what may be mentioned here, is Steiner’s profound knowledge of Adorno’s work, which he however assesses from an ontological, rather than a dialectic stance. The human right to self-​identity and self-​expression, denied to colonized Ireland was the more fervently to be reclaimed by those Irish artists and intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who were acutely conscious of the reciprocity between language, place, culture, and identity. Still in 1982, Friel in interview refers to the insufficiency of English to express the Gaelic mind. His observation is that ‘the whole cultural burden that every word in the English language carries is slightly different to our burden’.113 It recalls Stephen Dedalus’s assessment of the English language which to an Irish person simultaneously is ‘so familiar and so foreign’.114 As the solution of the dilemma Friel proposes the reconciliation between the familiar and the foreign leading to something new in which elements of both are preserved, according to their respective identities and needs, in the dialectic process of preservation and change. Regarding the inadequacy of discursive language, George Steiner’s definition of the significative word as ‘the linguistic fact’115 whose limitation must be transcended, corroborates Adorno’s thesis of the difference between the concept and the thing conceived. Accordingly, Friel explores, or ‘divines’ the ungraspable space behind the facts, their metaphysical ‘more’, and its dynamics with the aim to open his audience to this literally extraordinary, ecstatic sphere where ‘words (are) no longer necessary’.116 As has 112 113 114

115 116

Friel, Plays 1, p. 445. Murray, Brian Friel, p. 109. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Harmondsworth/​Middlesex, Penguin, 1963), p. 189: ‘The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. … His language, so familiar and so foreign, will always be form e an acquired language. … My soul frets in the shadow of his language.’ George Steiner, After Babel (Oxford/​New York: OUP, 1992), p. 187. Friel, Plays 2, p. 108.

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been discussed before, these irrational moments of ‘realized utopia’ needs its rational other in order to become conscious so as to be integrated into factual reality. Thought cannot do without conceptual language, as Adorno emphasizes, while the isolated concept, like the isolated fact, is incapable of expressing the whole. In that Friel’s plays simultaneously depict and transcend the facts, they become enlightening and therapeutic. Their dialectics reiterates Adorno’s view that dialectics ‘serves the end of reconcilement’.117 Being more than a system of words, mimetic language also communicates the unspeakable as the ambiguous language of wholeness. Acknowledging the transcending character of truth, Friel re-​unites cognition with fact. In his words, language is ‘one of the big inheritances which we have received from the British’, therefore ‘(w)e must make English identifiably our own language’ (emphasis by me).118 As he famously has his hedge school master declare, a civilization calcifies, if it is ‘imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of … fact’.119

Music and Language ‘You’d learn so much more listening to the music’,120 Friel’s Janácek tells the student Anezka from his liminal space between physical death and spiritual life, linking the here with the beyond, and the past with the present, and finally art with life. In her doctoral thesis, Anezka compares the Czech composer’s ‘Intimate Letters’ to Kamila Stösslovà with their transformation into music, Janácek’s Second String Quartet Nr. 2, on the basic question: which is truer, the text or the music? That in their conversation at once irreal and real conversation, Janácek calls music his ‘first language, (…) much more demanding’121 than the verbality of his letters, equally 117 118 119 120 121

Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 6. Murray, Brian Friel, p. 87. Friel, Selected Plays, p. 419. Brian Friel, Performances (2003), in Plays 3 (London: Faber & Faber, 2014), p. 478. Ibid., p. 479.

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applies to Adorno. Having grown up with music, he was both a listener, creator, and performer of music, and its analyst and critic throughout his entire life. In his view, music had to illuminate and expand individual consciousness by reconciling subject with object, instead of numbing the mind by subjecting it to the commercial interests of mass culture. As the Irish expert on Critical Theory, Brian O’Connor, points out, ‘over half of the twenty volumes of Adorno’s collected works deal in some way with the subject’.122 When Adorno stopped his musical compositions, his verbal utterance continued to be of the highest aesthetic and precision. Ultimately, both Adorno and Friel conceive music as a mediator between the absolute and the damaged world, which makes music dialectic in itself. In his short piece, ‘Fragment on Music and Language’,123 Adorno discusses the similarity and difference between the two. Music, he explains, is similar to language as a sequence of sounds in time; but its sounds are ‘more than sounds’ in that they point to the essence of a thing, which at the same time they conceal. By this ambivalence as irrational rationality, or rational irrationality, great music saves its objects from standardization, classification and calculated reification; that it mimetically expresses its object in its wholeness and uniqueness makes music a paradigm of negative dialectics, affecting the receptive mind on its ‘fundamental levels’ more directly and inescapably than the visual and verbal arts. To discover the truth conveyed through music, one must ‘think with one’s ears’,124 as Adorno has famously put it. Representing the unity of thought and action, music and drama are performing arts. In Performances (2003), Friel’s composer Janácek seems to give priority to music over the word. However, as the play ends, Janácek hesitatingly concedes that they could co-​exist, may be ‘held in a kind of equilibrium. Even be seen to illuminate one another.’125 What counts is 1 22 Brian O’Connor, ed., The Adorno Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 267. 123 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Fragment über Musik und Sprache’, in Gesammelte Schriften 16, Musikalische Schriften I–​III, Digitale Bibliothek Bd. 97 (Berlin: Directmedia, 2003), pp. 251–​252. 124 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Die gewürdigte Musik’, in Gesammelte Schriften 15, Kompositionen für den Film, Digitale Bibliothek Bd. 97 (Berlin: Directmedia, 2003), p. 184. 125 Brian Friel, Performances (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 2003), p. 38.

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the magic of the transcending aesthetic experience, offered through the mimetic language of music, or the written text. Therefore, the final words of the play, linking together music and theatre, could be Friel’s own words; but they come from one of the young musicians on the stage as the urgent request: ‘Play –​ play –​ play!’126 The Irish musicologist Harry White, defines the use of music in Friel’s plays as ‘a subversive metalanguage in the advancement of dramatic meaning.’127 Hence, the diverse genres of music employed –​classical compositions, hymns, Jazz, or folk –​have different functions from enhancing a situation or a sentiment, to plain sarcasm. In Aristocrats (1979) for instance, the romantic pieces by Mendelssohn and Chopin express a character’s unfulfilled longing; in The Home Place (2005), Thomas Moore’s lyrical poem ‘Oft in the Stilly Night’, set to music by the Irish composer John Andrew Stevenson, rouses nostalgic memories. Mendelssohns’ intonation of Heinrich Heine’s ‘On Wings of Song’ in Give Me Your Answer, Do (1997) underlines a utopian dream; in Wonderful Tennessee (1993), the reader or spectator cannot miss the ironic function of the hit ‘I want to be happy’; nor can Fred Astaire’s ‘The way you look tonight’ hide the sarcasm at the faith healer’s reception of the disfigured whom he rarely can heal. The most immediate and striking experience of music which even grasps the audience, occurs in Dancing at Lughnasa (1991) as the five Mundy sisters escape their pressures of life through their spontaneous, ecstatic dance to an Irish reel sounding from their old ‘Marconi’. It is a dance in which the pure life force is unleashed, expressing ‘defiance, aggression’ under ‘a crude mask of happiness’.128 In this scene of Dionysian exuberance metaphysical experience is literally incorporated and for a brief moment restores the individual to its true and unique self. But any escape is the escape from something; in that Friel shows the Ireland of the 1930s in the context of an endangered world –​the Civil War in Spain, a sick missionary returning home from Africa, the destruction of family bonds through industrialization –​Friel

1 26 Ibid., p. 39. 127 Harry White, ‘Brian Friel and the Condition of Music’, Irish University Review (Special Issue –​Brian Friel) 29/​1 (Spring/​Summer 1999), 7. 128 Friel, Plays 2, p. 35.

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depicts an aporetic condition which not only makes Dancing at Lughnasa a melancholic play, a melancholy that adheres to art and artists alike.

The Material and the Immaterial Friel’s play of 2005, The Home Place, is set in 1878, another critical year in the history of Ireland at the beginning of the Industrial Age, a time of rural unrest that led to the Irish Land War, whereas it could have paved the way to Home Rule. Twenty years earlier, in 1859, Darwin’s revolutionary book had been published, titled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection Or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The researcher of nature (rather than a natural scientist) was keenly aware of the dramatic consequences the book would have for religious teachings, for society, and for human self-​understanding in general. A couple of years later, in accordance with the contemporary trends, it was indeed interpreted on an entirely materialistic basis. In an era of economic, social, and political unbalances, the attempts to uphold old securities clashed with the rise of subversive forces. What was declared as progress, was in fact a wide system of identifications and classifications not only in the field of technology but also of human nature and nature as a whole; it favoured social and political problems, rather than resolving them. Ethnology, anthropology, anthropometry, keywords in The Home Place,129 equated character with outer appearance. Materialistically oriented science measured humans as natural objects and classified them according to their usefulness (practices that today are not yet extinct). In Friel’s play, the character of Richard Gore represents the divisive force that individually, socially, and ‘racially’ distinguishes between superior and inferior –​standards that were used to justify colonialism and imperialism. Viewed under a philosophical and sociological perspective, The Home Place is more than a history play that shows the Anglo-​Irish Christopher Gore, posed between the materialism and assumed superiority of his 129

Friel, Plays 3, p. 506.

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British cousin Richard Gore on the one hand, and the different shades of Irishness on the other. As with Translations, written a quarter of a century earlier, Friel again tacitly wants his Irish audience to recognize and to solve the unsolved questions of their past: setting The Home Place in the Ireland of beginning modernity, Friel indicates that even in postmodernity hostility and contempt among the radicals on both sides, Anglo-​ Saxon and Irish, are still the same, though their motivations differ. But Friel also shows the existence of conciliatory attitudes derived from the belief in an other, and in otherness. Underlying Friel’s play is the universal knowledge of what creates, and of what destroys a home place, past and present. Ireland’s struggle for freedom and self-​identity could be a model for all human struggle against repression, reification and exploitation, showing at the same time, how precarious the effort of breaking through the vicious circle of force and counter-​force, of victor and victimized, is in reality. In The Home Place, the metaphysical sphere of life is drawn with greater subtleness and with deeper melancholy than in Translations. And yet, the possibility of wholeness is literally in the air as ‘(t)he ethereal, sophisticated singing’ of the village school choir drifting over from beyond –​according to Friel’s stage direction, it sounds ‘wondrous (…) in this unlikely setting’.

Conclusion The juxtaposition of Adorno and Friel shows their commitment to peace through the compensating means of philosophical theory and art. Their commitment derives from their common dialectic of critique and reconcilement, which renounces positivistic, short-​sighted results, in Adorno’s formulation: ‘(N)egation of negation that will not become a positing.’130 This indeterminacy renders Adorno’s and Friel’s dialectics ambiguous, contrary to common logics which they transcend by uniting the knowable with the unknowable. In this way, the philosopher and the artist are 130

Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 406.

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closer to the absolute than the identifying subject that shapes the object from its own restricted position. Mediation, in Adorno a central epistemological conception, is for Friel the task of the artist, expressed in the work of art. The unavoidable material form of the latter is transcended and points to the immateriality of a utopian whole. The mind cannot possess it, but experience it in the ambiguous and elusive state of ‘realized utopia’. Self-​reflection, necessarily linked with reflections on objective world, is the precondition for such liberating experience. ‘Is art lighthearted?,’131 Adorno asks in Notes to Literature. Giving the common use of a word a dialectic meaning without separating it from its historical roots, he transforms the traditional, bourgeois separation between life and art into their reciprocity. ‘Art is no mechanism for delight’,132 Adorno quotes Kant, and yet, he continues, if it ‘were not a pleasure for people, in however mediated a form, it would not have been able to survive in the naked existence of contradicts and resists’. Later, Friel formulated the same idea in his own diction. ‘What is lighthearted in art’, Adorno explains, is ‘the opposite of what one might easily assume it to be: not its content, but its demeanor. (…) A priori, prior to its works, art is a critique of the brute seriousness that reality imposes upon human beings.’133 As for Friel, to whom ‘the imagination is the only conscience’,134 art for Adorno ‘imagines that by naming (…) the fateful state of affairs, it is loosening its hold. That is what is lighthearted in it. As a change in the existing mode of consciousness (…) that is also its seriousness.’135 Friel’s theatre grounds in this inherent contradiction of art, calling it ‘The Theatre of Hope and Despair’. ***

131 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Is Art Lighthearted?’, in Notes to Literature 2, trans. by Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York:  Columbia University Press, 1992). With this title, Adorno interrogates the prologue to Friedrich Schiller’s Wallenstein’ ‘Ernst ist das Leben, heiter ist die Kunst’ (Life Is Serious, Art Is Lighthearted). 132 Ibid., p. 248. 133 Ibid. 134 Murray, Brian Friel, p. 68. 135 Adorno, Notes to Literature 2, p. 248.

Chapter 2

Metaphysical Experience and the Problem of Tradition

Transcending the System In his book, Brian Friel’s Drama, Richard Rankin Russell lists seven ‘fundamental questions’ that he finds as yet ‘insufficiently answered’ by the critics. There seems to be one key question under which all the others may be subsumed: ‘What are his (Brian Friel’s, CVM) abiding philosophical interests and how do they inform his plays?’1 To this, Brian Friel himself has supplied a clear answer both personally and mediated through his work. Apart from his private assertion that ‘never was there (…) a philosophy being explored in my work’,2 it has remained Friel’s conviction that ‘the only thing that is of absolute importance is life  –​being alive and holding on to this condition’, adding that ‘this isn’t really a cause for joy.’3 It still betrays an implicit philosophical basis of Friel’s work, without which all art would be nothing but shallow pastime. In his Minima Moralia (1944–​1947) Adorno holds that ‘from time immemorial’, ‘the teaching of a good life’ was regarded ‘as the true field of philosophy’4 –​ a 1 2 3 4

Richard Rankin Russell, Modernity, Community, and Place in Brian Friel’s Drama (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014), p. 7. Brian Friel in a private letter to the present author of 19 July 2012. Christopher Murray, ed., Brian Friel:  Essays, Diaries, Interviews  –​1964–​1999 (London: Faber & Faber, 1999), p. 25. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia. Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. by E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2002), p. 15.

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view that necessarily transcends the closed system, opening itself up to all layers and facets of life. Accordingly, Friel made it his prime concern to explore the ‘dark and private places of individual souls’5 with all their eventualities and incalculabilities, their truths and untruths. It involves Friel’s knowledge of literatures and philosophies from antiquity to the present, including the social and economic teachings of Karl Marx, as well as the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung. Critically considering the various ways of dealing with the human plight, Friel does not didactically employ them as models, or guide-​lines for his own thinking. Should a play be defined by his personal feelings, as for instance The Freedom of the City (1973), a retrospective view on events of Derry’s Bloody Sunday (1972), Friel later expressed his reservations against it. To a certain degree, the maxim that ‘you have to get away from a corrupting influence’,6 goes for all true artists. Nonetheless, Friel incorporates relevant ideas in his plays as direct quotations, or by transforming them according to the artistic requirements of the play. His dramatic characters do not only appear in their mutual relations, but they also reflect their social and political situations that significantly shape their ideas of happiness. Friel presents the truths and untruths in the comportment of his characters from a critical distance, yet with empathy and often with irony, leaving it to his audience to ask their own questions and draw their conclusions. His plays thus end ambiguously, open to all possibilities, and yet with perceptible truths for those with eyes to see and ears to hear.

The Ambivalence of Language: Identity Versus Identification ‘I look at the row of Wittgenstein books on the shelf. Nothing,’7 Friel dryly notes in his Sporadic Diary when working on Give Me Your Answer, 5 6 7

See Murray, Brian Friel, p. 77. Ibid., p. 2. Ibid., p. 166.

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Do. Although convinced, with Wittgenstein, that the great questions of life cannot be resolved by pure logic, Friel does not follow Wittgenstein’s positivistic line of argumentation. While evidently sharing Wittgenstein’s belief in something beyond ‘the world as a limited whole’,8 something beyond logical comprehension and consequently past immediate representation, the artist Friel aimed to mimetically bridge the gap between the expressible and the inexpressible, instead of just thinking it. That this can be done only dialectically affiliates Friel less with the fact-​oriented Wittgenstein (1889–​1951) than with the dialectic theorist, Theodor W. Adorno (1903–​1969) –​an affiliation of which Friel himself became aware only late in life. Showing the delusiveness of positivistic thought, it was Adorno’s objective ‘to counter Wittgenstein by uttering the unutterable’.9 The identifying language of formal logic is incapable to catch the ungraspable truth of an object, while the nonsignificative language of art transcends the graspable fact. Similar to Friel’s own conception, language as the means of human expression, including the irrational, is multi-​ levelled and mutable. Throughout his work, Adorno shows that cognition depends not only on the reciprocal relationship between thought and emotion, rationality and the irrational, but also on time. This makes language dialectic and unfixable. Psychologically, socially, and historically placed in the context of the knowable and unknowable, it requires of conscious individuals the continuous critical reflection on their position in changing life, instead of taking for absolute what is immediately graspable. That such totalizing thinking has led to disaster, is the philosophical theme that defines Friel’s theatre. Its language is not immediate, but mimetic through what Adorno calls ‘aesthetic constellations’ of characters and other particulars. For only in its context with others can the fragment form a whole, and through this cognition it is redeemed. This aesthetic conception is fundamental to all works of art and a model for fulfilment in ordinary life –​a model that can never be identified with the absolute

8 9

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-​Philosophicus, § 6.45. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. by E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 9.

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whole. In Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) Friel has symbolized this dialectic by the broken mirror, whose fragments still point to the unbroken whole. Language that mediates truth goes beyond the functionality of ordinary communication in which the verbal concept and the thing conceived are identical. ‘Direct communicability to everyone is not a criterion of truth’, Adorno points out, adding with special regard to the cultural developments of modernity, that ‘at present, each communicative step is falsifying truth and selling it out’.10 In The Communication Cord (1982), Friel’s response to the widely controversial reception of his play of 1980, significantly titled Translations, the artist has satirized the distortions and concealments of truth through identifying language. Of all of Friel’s plays, Translations,11 is the most striking example of the mediative character of the dialectic of language; as ‘translation’ it is the precondition for peace, whereas if used to split human relations, its consequences are disastrous, as Friel demonstrates satirically in The Communication Cord. All understanding means translation as George Steiner with his influence on Friel’s view on language writes; in Adornian terms, it translates subject into object and object into subject. Identifying concepts, though necessary as orientation in the world of facts can only be abstractions, disregarding an individual’s unique response to the ruling objective conditions, and therefore they impede the formation of identity. Rational identification, though being both product and instrument of human development, must go hand in hand with mimetic empathy in order to enable the cognition of truth. It requires an individual subject’s literal interest in the other, as much as a self-​critical mind. Gareth O’Donnell, Friel’s young protagonist In Philadelphia, Here I Come (1964), still struggling for personal liberation and identity, is dramatically split into Gar ‘Public’ and Gar ‘Private’, which renders the difference between identity and reductive identification the more obvious. The interplay of characters in theatrical performance can stand for all of art’s aesthetic constellations aimed to express an idea or a thing as 1 0 11

Ibid., p. 41. Brian Friel in his Sporadic Diary:  ‘What worries me about the play (…) are the necessary peculiarities, especially the political elements. Because the play has to do with language and only language’ (Murray, Brian Friel, p. 75).

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precisely as possible, while neither in art nor in ordinary life, the dynamics of reality from unfathomable origins to unpredictable future can warrant unchangeable identity; instead, it persistently forces the individual subject to decide between adaptation and rejection, thus confronting it with inevitable uncertainties. Unlike the verbal concept, the single word is dialectic in character, indicating something beyond themselves which eludes direct objectification. Words are ‘signals, counters’,12 as Friel’s multilingual hedge school master says in Translations (1980). Seamus Heaney (1939–​2013), Friel’s compatriot and friend, has defined the doubleness of words as ‘bearers of history and mystery,’13 suggesting their simultaneity of worldliness and otherworldliness. As names, words claim to define identity, which in truth is more than mere recognizability; they summarize properties without solving the enigma from which an individual derives its natural dignity. While in Translations, Yolland’s romantic statement ‘each name a perfect equation with its roots,’14 omits the elements of change and the unknowable, Frank Hardy’s ritual invocation of the Welsh place names in Faith Healer (1980) have lost their materiality and become invigorating memories of happiness, although, as the play suggests, they may have been unidentical with the actual events. As Welsh ‘Aberarder, Aberayron, Llangranog, Llangurig, Abergorlech (…)’,15 they point to the Gaelic culture as a whole, as well as to Hardy’s imagined wholeness. Interestingly, it has a parallel in Adorno’s vital memories of past moments of happiness that resounds in names like ‘Otterbach, Watterbach, Reuenthal, Monbrunn’,16 villages in southern Germany where as a child he spent his holidays.

12 13 14 15 16

Friel, Selected Plays (London/​Boston: Faber & Faber, 1984), p. 419. Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations (London: Faber & Faber, 1984), p. 45. Friel, Selected Plays, p. 422. Friel, Faith Healer, pp. 331–​332. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1973), p. 366.

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The Physical and Its Metaphysical Other Contrary to the noun ‘word’ with its ancient roots and changes of meaning, Adorno as a philosophical theorist operated with the German ‘Begriff ’, indicating that something has been ‘gripped’, or grasped. ‘Concept’, Its English correspondence, derived from Latin, is equally focused on the palpability of objective form. Form, however, needs the ambiguity of content that is open to the various perspectives of interpretation. As even communicative language implies misunderstandings, aesthetic constellations of concepts must be utterly balanced in order to express an object’s hidden truth. Adorno’s dictum that ‘(c)oncepts alone can achieve what the concept prevents’,17 again indicates the interdependence of the particular and the universal mimetically reflected in the transformation of empirical reality into wholeness. The cognition of its truth ought to reflect itself in empirical reality as the power of reconciliation and renewal. The processuality of life, which is never fully achieved, does not invalidate the idea of utopia. Its mimetic is created in every great work of art; it is basic to Friel’s theatre. ’Completion is an illusion’,18 the playwright confirms, and yet, being dedicated to truth, he aims to make ‘the actual thing and the ideal thing’19 converge. Adorno similarly speaks of ‘the mutual approximation of thing and expression to the point when the difference fades’.20 The objectification of something non-​objective takes place in the individual mind as aesthetic experience. In a moment of cognition which induces a sense of happiness, the creative artist has reached the reconciliation of opposites which, objectified through the work, must translate itself to the recipients. Such moments of ‘realized utopia’,21 defined by Adorno also as metaphysical experience, cannot be described in positivistic terms. Of this, 17 18 19 20 21

Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 53. Friel, ‘Programme Note’, in Murray, Brian Friel, p. 89. Friel, ‘Sporadic Diary’, in Murray, Brian Friel, p. 75. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 56. ‘verwirklichte Utopie’. See: Adorno, Kritische Modelle 1 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 2003), p. 121.

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Friel, too, is fully aware, when he describes the moment of the cognition of truth in the negative as being ‘neither reality, nor dreams’.22 T. S. Eliot, with his well-​known influence on Friel, has expressed the elusiveness of aesthetic experience symbolically: ‘You are the music while the music lasts.’23 According to Adornian negative dialectics, culture depends on the cognition of metaphysical truth behind physical appearance. Some philosophers, although like Adorno inspired by Hegel and Marx, held the final realization of utopian peace to be the teleological aim of history. To Adorno and his mentor and friend, Max Horkheimer (1895–​1973), however, the realization of utopia happens in the mind, calling for its transformation into practice. Adorno was also profoundly influenced by Nietzsche’s critique of modernity, but only the atrocities of the German Holocaust shattered his belief in human progress. In their seminal book, Dialectic of Enlightenment, jointly written in their American exile, Horkheimer and Adorno traced human culture back to its beginnings, coming to the conclusion that in human history myth and knowledge have never been separated from one another: ‘myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts into mythology.’24 Friel’s ‘Theatre of Hope and Despair’ is the expression of this very ambivalence. The clinical term ‘blindsight’ used by the neurologist Oliver Sacks, offered Friel a fitting metaphor for its dialectic. Molly Sweeney (1994) shows the erroneous consequences, if enlightenment and myth become antagonists. In the projects of blind Molly’s fanciful husband, and a doctor trying to restore his failed life by operating on her, rationality is instrumental and self-​serving. Friel’s blind heroine has obtained her knowledge of the outer world through the direct contact and empathic touch with others, first in her childhood by her father’s loving guidance, later as a physical therapist. Having Molly acquire her blindness in early infancy, Friel is far from depicting a perfect world, yet she has managed her life through the love she received and dedication she applies in her job. Her inner and outer balance ends when her fanciful husband persuades her to 22 Brian Friel, Selected Stories (Oldcastle: The Gallery Press, 1994), p. 109. 23 T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (London: Faber & Faber, 2003), p. 30. 24 See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. by John Cumming (London/​New York: Verso, 1997), p. XVI.

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have eye surgery. It would have been a fair suggestion, had it not been in his own interests. His longing for greater freedom is just as human, as the doctor’s wish to restore his fractured life by an operation, whose result is, however, uncertain. Molly ends blindsighted, to be hospitalized for the rest of her life. Convergingly, the play can be assessed from as being negative, or positive, or rather both at once. Concerning the latter, it can be taken as a metaphor for the clinical condition of life with the only possible solution. For a short time, Molly’s eyes were opened to cast a dim glance on the world as it is: a world of human illusions and delusions. Her insight that the sighted can be blind, while the blind can see the truth has raised her above all dichotomies. In her new ‘borderline country’ she is neither questioning, nor innocently happy, but ‘at ease’.25 Rather than feeling isolated, she is in contact with the truly suffering. Friel’s also implicitly deals with the role of an artist –​torn between reality and imagination, between gift and vanity, between success and failure. From the inner split of St. Columba in The Enemy Within (1975) to the intermediate state between uncertainty and redemption as in Faith Healer (1979), to the liberated artist who lives on and inspires through his work, as in Performances (2003), Friel explores the inner tensions and contradictions an artist, who is simultaneously within and without the defective world.

Truth as the Unity of Contradictions In the human unconscious, the sense of primeval wholeness has survived as dark, indistinct memory,26 but often it enters the mind distorted and corrupt. Critical self-​reflection, as Friel knows, is essential to the responsible artist who is aware of the uncertainty of his or her efforts, apart from the knowledge that no artist is exempt from the natural human defects. Adorno has illustrated this aporia with the ancient saying ‘to heal the 2 5 See Brian Friel, Molly Sweeney (London: Penguin, 1994), p. 67. 26 See also Friel’s metaphor of the bells of Kitezh, in Murray, Brian Friel, p. 180.

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wound with the spear that afflicted it’.27 Therefore, ‘(t)he individual can find liberation only through ‘the self-​consciousness of the objective context of delusion; it does not mean to have escaped from that context.’28 The cognition of truth is possible only through the acceptance of a defective and changeable world ‘The core of truth is historical’,29 Adorno and Horkheimer state in Dialectic of Enlightenment, thus subverting the traditional idea of truth as a pre-​existent absolute. Instead, it is transferred into the dialectical sphere of human responsibility, which recreates truth ever anew in correspondence with the changing circumstances. Friel attributes to the arts a universal principle of modernity: ‘the persistence of search; the discovery of a new concept; the analysis, exploration exposition of that concept.’30 It means the constant mediation between physical appearance and its metaphysical context, what Jürgen Habermas, critical theorist of the second generation of the Frankfurt School calls ‘ethical universalism’.31 The open-​endedness of Friel’s plays invites their audiences to reflection and self-​reflection, at the same time offering them open thinking as the only possible solution. ‘But to sell for an affirmation, for an answer, to be free of that grinding uncertainty, that would be so wrong for him and so wrong for his work’,32 Daisy enthusiastically proclaims in Give Me Your Answer, Do, when her husband, the writer Tom Connelly tries to overcome his dilemma of writing for the sake of truth, or for money that the family badly needs.

27 It thus occurs in Wagner’s Parcival. Also see T. S. Eliot, ‘East Coker’, in Four Quartets (London: Faber & Faber, 1979), p. 18: ‘The wounded surgeon plies the steel/​That questions the distempered part/​Beneath the bleeding hands we feel/​The sharp compassion of the healer’s art.’ 28 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 406. 29 Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. IX. 30 Brian Friel, ‘The Theatre of Hope and Despair’, in Murray, Brian Friel, p. 16. 31 Jürgen Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2016). 32 Brian Friel, Give Me Your Answer, Do (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 1997), p. 79.

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Transition and Transcendence Open thinking implies the readiness to break with what is familiar, if that is blocking the process of life. Friel, primarily interpreted T. S. Eliot’s line, ‘the breakage of what has believed in as most reliable’33 in the sense of Irish mentality, when in Translations he has his hedge school master say: We like to think we endure around truths immemorially posited.’34 Friel referred to the fundamental Irish problem, namely the far-​reaching consequences of Britain’s colonization of Ireland. Linking the past state of colonization with the Irish present, the necessary open-​mind has become Friel’s subject in his play of 1980. Yet all his other plays, too, deal with the idea of transition and change, an Irish problem, but at the same time a fundamental problem of human existence. Adorno’s conception of Critical Theory is ‘essentially a theory of crisis’,35 and a call for the transcendence of the status quo, personally, collectively, or nationally. Christopher Murray sees ‘at the heart of Friel’s spirituality’ a ‘celebration of transcendence’, with the transcendent being reached ‘through exposure of blatant secularity’.36 The objective, exterior phase of transition asks for the rather subjective and interior step that consciously transcends borderlines. With particular emphasis on the dialectic unity of the physical and the metaphysical, Adorno metaphysics and the physical: ‘No recollection of transcendence is possible anymore save by way of perdition; eternity appears not as such, but diffracted through the most perishable.’37 In interview, Friel himself held that ‘if there is an afterlife, the only way one can merit it is by totally being involved in the here-​and-​now’.38 Transcendence as a conscious process is inevitably related to cognition. It may come about as an individual’s sudden epiphanic experience, or reveal itself gradually, 3 3 34 35 36 37 38

T. S. Eliot, ‘The Dry Salvages’, in Four Quartets (London: Faber & Faber, 1995), p. 25. Friel, Plays 1 (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), p. 418. Roger Behrens, Adorno-​ABC (Leipzig: Reclam, 2003), p. 131 (my translation). Christopher Murray, The Theatre of Brian Friel: Tradition and Modernity (London/​ New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), p. 164. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 360. ‘Interview with Desmond Rushe’, in Murray, Brian Friel, p. 26.

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yet its truth always interlinks the rational with irrational emotion. What Eliot has described as the ‘intersection of the timeless with time’,39 is to Adorno, without any ontological touch, a subject’s magical experience of unity with an object. In Friel’s early short story ‘Among the Ruins’, a father, caught in self-​alienating everyday routine, suddenly remembers his true self and raison d’ ètre, when watching his child being joyfully immersed in a self-​invented game. The father is struck by the insight that ‘(t) he past did have meaning’, that ‘(i)t was simply continuance, life repeating itself and surviving’:40 Decades later, in Give Me Your Answer, Do, Friel no longer presents continuance as a natural given, but rather as the product of human endeavour: ‘Be faithful to the routine gestures, and the bigger thing will come to you’,41 as the writer Tom Connolly is encouraged by his wife. Transcendence also means faith, faith in oneself, and faith in the other; and faith in the redemption of the ‘most perishable’. To consciously deny transition means to deny life itself, fossilizing42 and self-​alienating. Friel’s conception of faith is similar to Adorno’s idea of ‘open thinking’. In his essay titled ‘Resignation’, Adorno holds that ‘(o)pen thinking points whereby it becomes ‘transformative praxis’, a ‘sensible, non-​violent (…) form of resistance.’43

A New Metaphysics After Freud’s discovery of the unconscious, and the man-​made catastrophes of the twentieth century, a ‘radical reconceptualization of metaphysics’44 has taken place. Adorno’s afore-​quoted statement that ‘transcendence T. S. Eliot, in: Four Quartets, p. 30. Brian Friel, Selected Stories (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Books, 1994), p. 109. Friel, Give Me Your Answer, Do, p. 71. Brian Friel, Translations, in Plays 1, p. 445. Theodor W. Adorno, Critical Models:  Interventions and Catchwords, trans. by Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 293. 4 Brian O’Connor, Adorno (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 89. 4 3 9 40 41 42 43

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feeds on nothing but the experience we have in immanence’,45 defines the break with the traditional Christian belief that strictly distinguishes between an absolute God-​father and his creation, directing metaphysics, in the words of the Irish philosopher Brian O’Connor, towards ‘a space within materiality’.46 Responsibility for humans and nature of which mankind is a part, solely depends on the thinking individual in its social and historical context. The secular conception of metaphysics which sees the contradictions united in the ‘here and now’, as Friel has put it, and that in doing so follows its knowledge of the absolute whole that the part is unable to comprehend, also dialectically unites freedom and necessity. We are free to choose because we must choose. Like Adorno, Friel can be viewed as a representative of ‘real humanism’.47 The animosities and threats against the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland, which Friel experienced as a child, and the war-​like ‘Troubles’ that he witnessed as an adult, did not result in political plays, but in theatrically interrogating the psychological and historical background of both human failures and strengths in his country, he asks his audience to think and choose for themselves. Mainly focused on Ireland, they mirror at the same time the human psyche in general. The device of Critical Theory: ‘What is must be changeable if it is not to be all’,48 presupposes a person’s awareness of the dialectic of preservation and rejection. What is to be rejected are the abstracting forces of norms and traditions as they impede self-​knowledge and a critical view on the state of reality. Reasonable norms and traditions, on the other hand, grant social order and a sense of history. To know where we live includes the knowledge of where we have come from. For the Irish, for whom a reconstruction of their destroyed culture partly meant invention,49 the 45 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 398. 46 O’Connor, Adorno, p. 88. 47 See:  Alfred Schmidt, ‘Adorno  –​ein Philosoph des realen Humanismus’, in A. Schmidt, ed., Kritische Theorie, Humanismus, Aufklärung (Stuttgart:  Reclam, 1981), pp. 27–​55. 48 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 398. 49 Also see: Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1995).

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tightrope walk between myth and reality has been particularly precarious. Friel’s assertion that ‘(w)hat we accepted as our cultural identity is worth preserving’50 is set against his scepticism against ‘the wholeness, the integrity of a Gaelic past’,51 a mythification that prevents change. In a larger frame, Joep Leerssen’s characterization of Irish history as a ‘series of disruptions of the past, rather than a traditionary accumulation growing out of it’52 applies to European history and imperialism as a whole, a challenge for a different conception of identity. Characterizing modernity, Adorno has stated that ‘(t)he scars of damage and disruption have become the seal of authenticity’.53 Friel for his part sees ‘all the scaffolding, all the crutches we depend upon’ (…) ‘whipped away’ by modern dramatist.54 His own theatre, however, couples despair with hope, not as a sign of optimism, but as the ‘definite negation’ (a key term of Adorno adopted from Hegel) to all absolutes in human thought, and hence corresponding to the conciliatory character of Adornian dialectics. If some of Friel’s protagonists are left at a metaphoric crossroads, or in a state of confusion, the artist shows the inseparability of freedom from uncertainty: ‘Confusion is not an ignoble condition’,55 his hedge school master says in Translations in face of life-​threatening ambiguity.

The ‘Insoluble Contradiction of Tradition’ On the national scale, Friel’s idea of tradition is affiliated with Adorno’s general view of tradition as an ‘insoluble contradiction’. An ‘indispensable element in the historical process, it is yet ‘ideologically corrupted 50 5 1 52 53 54 55

Murray, Brian Friel, p. 27. Ibid., p. 74. Joep Leerssen, Remembrance and Imagination, Field Day Monographs, No. 4 (Cork University Press in Association with Field Day), p. 105. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. by Robert Hullot-​Kentor (London:  The Athlone Press, 1997), p. 23. Murray, Brian Friel, p. 23. Friel, Plays 1 (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), p. 446.

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and subjectively ruined’, but ‘when every tradition has been extinguished, the march toward barbarism will begin.’56 Even the fight among different traditions does not rule out barbaric wars, as the Troubles in Northern Ireland have shown. Friel’s conviction that ‘(o)ne can never go back to the old culture, but it could extend to the present day’57 indicates that also tradition necessitates the cognition of truth. In this sense, Adorno holds that ‘immersion into the historical dimension should reveal what preciously remained unresolved; in no other way can a relation between the present and the past be established’.58 Truth, as Adorno and Friel alike make clear, is cognizable only in the minds of individuals and, as Friel shows in Performances (2003) through his artist figure Janácek, from a distance, which alone lends clarity.59 Adorno similarly points out that the unity of continuity and change which characterizes tradition ‘can be construed only from a very great distance’,60 confronting the individual ‘with the most advanced state of consciousness’.61 T. S. Eliot, familiar to both Adorno and Friel confirms that ‘tradition can no longer be inherited, and if you want it, you must obtain it with great labour’.62 With modern technologies having led to a ‘breakdown of temporal continuity’,63 tradition has changed its function. In Adorno’s words, it no longer passes from generation to generation as in an eternal relay race’,64 but demands the persistent effort to keep tradition alive while not confirming it. In ‘erod(ing) old certainties’ in order to ‘clear the building site’,65 Friel sees the task of art in the first place, by which it may become a model to ordinary life. Thus Christopher Murray points out that in Friel’s 56 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘On Tradition’, in TELOS, Special Edition, No. 94 (Winter 1993), 78–​ 79. Original:  ‘Über Tradition’, in Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft 1 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1977), pp. 310–​320. 57 Murray, Brian Friel, p. 27. 58 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 19. 59 Brian Friel, Performances (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Books, 2003), p. 31. 60 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 210. 61 Adorno, in TELOS, No. 94, p. 78. 62 Krank Kermode, Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), p. 38. 63 Adorno, in TELOS, No. 94, p. 76. 64 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 20. 65 Murray, Brian Friel, p. 106.

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plays, tradition functions as ‘a critique of the institutions held accountable for various kinds of impoverishment’.66 It makes Friel a postmodern artist beyond the range of nationality. As early as in 1957, Adorno observed that modern society has become a closely knit functional context, a whole that informs and fully integrates its individuals.67 Among the diverse ways of breaking out of the constraints of such contexts, the only reasonable way is the continual checking and rebalancing of subjective reality and the world without. ‘We must learn where we live’,68 as in interview Friel confirms the words of his hedge school master in Translations, does not mean a finality, rather, in self-​identity and communal, or national identity, change and continuance are dialectically united. To quote another Northerner and Friel’s friend, the Nobel-​laureate Seamus Heaney: ‘You don’t have to abandon values which you have created in order to be open in the world to other values.’69

Aristocrats: Tradition Versus Traditionalism ‘Semper permanemus’, the O’Donnell’s motto of ‘four generations of a great Irish legal dynasty’70 in Aristocrats, reflects Friel’s sarcasm not only about its adoption of the overcome standards of the Protestant ruling class, but also about the attitude of self-​importance and arrogance. Years before, the Judge’s wife had committed suicide; her husband and last aristocrat patriarch of the family, lies on his deathbed, constantly being watched by a baby alarm, and his aged brother is equally demented. Material security at the costs of obedience and isolation is coming to an end. While 66 Christopher Murray, ‘Recording Tremors: Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa and the Uses of Tradition’, in William Kerwin, ed., Brian Friel: A Casebook (London/​ New York: Garland Publishing, 1997), p. 28. 67 See Theodor W. Adorno, Vorträge 1949–​1968 (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2019), p. 196. 68 Murray, Brian Friel, p. 85 and Friel, Translations, in Selected Plays 1, p. 444. 69 Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney (London: Faber & Faber, 2008), p. 456. 70 Friel, Plays 1, p. 294.

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the youngest daughter is naively looking forward to her marriage with a widowed grocer, her other siblings have already been confronted with the challenges of real life. Friel shows a whole range of uncertainties freedom brings along, from hope to despair, from awaiting the future with self-​ confidence and steadfastness, to the frantic search for one’s roots and the attempt to restore what irretrievably has been lost. Friel presents a spectrum of delusive escapes from suffering and constraints which, if viewed in their contexts, are yet comprehensible. The flight into dogmatic religion, into political activism, into alcoholism, into self-​preserving lies, and a marriage of convenience only deepen the existent problems. Despite these depressing facts and prospects, Friel step by step signals the possibility of liberation and a change of mind that comes from within. At the family gathering due to father’s imminent death, and the problem of how to maintain Ballybeg Hall, Casimir, who suffered most under his father, suddenly recalls the happy occasions in his youth, when he and his younger sister played croquet on the grounds of Ballybeg Hall –​significantly against the rules of the game. The fantastic stories Casimir had made up to impress the American researcher of the history of Catholic Irish aristocracy are forgotten, replaced by Casimir’s memories which now become reality again: After he traced the marks of the old croquet field that lay buried under the lawn, Casimir and Clair are now miming a game with ‘sudden vigour, buoyancy and excitement’,71 as they had done as youngsters. For a short time –​as long as the game lasts –​the old is being reinvented as something new. The ecstatic joy it creates in the participants reoccurs in the dance of the five Mundy sisters in Dancing at Lughnasa and, more intimately, in the love scene in Translations. Elevating though such experiences of wholeness are, they remain transient; the irrationality of emotion needs the rationality of cognition that gives it objective form and continuance, in order to change reality. Friel’s play gradually moves toward a resolution, in which the existing antagonisms are mutually reconciled. The resolution cannot be other than an open question, for the future has not become reality, and each of the family must continue to cope with the existent problems. Realistic Judith 71

Friel, Plays 1, p. 292.

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tries to keep Ballybeg House and to take care of Uncle George, bravely facing the costs, supported beyond class barriers by a friend from the village. Alice’s husband, Eamon, is the true middleman and mediator in the family. Of Irish peasant stock, married into the Roman Catholic upper class, he participates in both ‘the native Irish tradition and culture’ and ‘the life and life-​style’72 of the Big House. Knowing the truths of both sides, he rejects the American chronicler whose interest does not go beyond the collection of mere facts. Alice’s and Eamon’s emigration to London did not reduce Alice’s problems, yet while she turned to alcohol, Eamon, still rooted in a tradition of solidarity, has retained his natural solidarity. Away from London, their present, temporary return ‘home’ to Ballybeg Hall, gives Eamon the occasion to encourage his wife and turn her confusion into hopefulness: alice: I don’t know what I feel. Maybe a sense of release; of not being pursued; of the possibility of –​(Short pause) –​ of ‘fulfilment’. No. Just emptiness. Perhaps maybe a new start. Yes, I’ll manage. (Emphasis by me.) eamon: Because you’re of that tradition. alice: What tradition? eamon: Of discipline; of self-​discipline  –​residual aristocratic instincts.73 With father’s death, rigid traditionalism has opened the way to living tradition. The knowledge of one’s identity as a continual process that links present and past as remembrance, reconcilement and renewal, grants stability in face of the uncertainties of life. ‘Aristocratic’ is no longer the attribute of the upper class with its automatic heritability, but a conduct in every responsible, critical and self-​reflective human being. Eamon’s words echo the universal attitude held by Friel himself, for whom tradition always involves consideration to both self and other, expressed through loyalty. Neither altruistic love as personified in Judith nor erotic love 7 2 Ibid., p. 281. 73 Ibid., p. 324.

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can exist without it. In human solidarity, the ‘I’ and the ‘We’, thought and practice, change and continuance, reality and possibility are mutually united. As a modern dialectician, Friel puts even Eamon’s supportive words to the test, as he might still be in love with Alice’s sister Judith –​ evidently the main reason for Alice’s unhappiness. His question to Alice, ‘(h)ave we a context?’ and her answer ‘(l)et’s wait and see’74 equally express uncertainly as hope. Aristocrats ends with a scene in which ‘context’ is shown on the level of community, as the condition for peace, the balanced tension of unity and diversity. Gathered to say goodbye to one another, the siblings are united in exhilarating moment of togetherness. According to Friel’s stage direction, ‘(o)ne has the impression that this afternoon –​easy, relaxed and relaxing –​may go on indefinitely’.75 Yet the metaphysical experience, in which continuity and change have become one, is the promise not the warranty of a stable context. ‘Next year in Hamburg!’, Casimir enthusiastically continues his fantastic story-​telling, this time as an expression of hope. It alludes to the Jewish promise, ‘Next year in Jerusalem!’, the unrealistic-​realistic wish that for many generations has ritually been uttered at the opening meal at Pessach, and which closes the final meal at Jom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. ‘A party in Vienna!’,76 Eamon puts in more realistically. Together, his realism and Casimir’s fantasy, express what Jürgen Habermas calls ‘true presence’.77 It marks all aesthetic experience, and all true works of art.

74 75 76 77

Ibid. Ibid., p. 326. Ibid., p. 325. Jürgen Habermas, Philosophischer Diskurs der Moderne (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1983), p. 33.

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Conclusion The aesthetic experience of wholeness is essential to tradition, which instead of blocking authenticity, is informing it. Identity and tradition need the persistent confirmation of their balanced relation which involves the dialectic balance between all opposites in life. A look at the etymology of ‘experience’ may make this clear: The Latin verb experiri, from which it derives as verb and as noun, bears a range of meanings, all of which implying indefiniteness to a different degree: ‘to try, probe, undertake, get to know, bear, suffer’,78 not to omit ‘experiment’ and ‘peril’. At the same time, ‘experience’ indicates acquired knowledge, enrichment of the mind after some difficulty has been overcome, even though this is no finality. Friel, himself an ardent reader of Homer,79 had a clear idea of the dialectic of experience, as it means escape from peril, but on a higher level of consciousness may be faced with new perils. He therefore may have subscribed to Adorno’s comment on Odysseus’s encounter with the Sirens: ‘But the hero, to whom the temptation is directed, has reached maturity through suffering. Through the many mortal perils he has had to endure, the unity of his own life, the identity of the individual has been confirmed to him.’80 Ordinary human life, as well as the life of an artist, as Friel shows in the complex and multi-​facetious Faith Healer, experience is always twinned with peril; it only ends with physical death, or in total dementia. Therefore, Richard R. Russell’s claim that in Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) ‘and other plays’, Friel ‘shows the victory of modernity over rural Irish culture, often with devastating consequences’,81 ought to be taken with caution, lest it make of Friel a romantic reactionary. Against Dublin’s characterization as a conflation of rural and urban life, Friel held that ‘there is no ‘victory’ for either side because ‘neither side can retain its purity’.82 78 79 80 81 82

Menge-​Güth, Lateinisches Wörterbuch (Berlin, 1911) (my translations) Friel in letters to the present author, of 5 July, 25 August and 26 September 2011. Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 32. Russell, Modernity, Community and Place, p. 27. Friel, ‘Plays Peasant and Unpeasant’, in Murray, Brian Friel, p. 54.

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And when in 1970, Friel criticized Ireland for having become ‘a tenth-​rate image of America’,83 he did not reject modernity as such, but the commercial character of culture, that had spread in Ireland so that it may forget its tradition that links its memory with a critical and self-​critical national consciousness. As Friel shows in Give Me Your Answer, Do, artists have a special responsibility in portraying a nation’s truth, which is at the same time a universally human truth. To the writer Garret Fitzmaurice writing as mass entertainment is much more lucrative than for his conscientious writer-​friend Tom Connelly, who though suffering from writer’s block, does not sell truth for the big money and the amenities offered to those who can pay. Tom, however, can be sure of his wife’s solidarity and encouragement, whereas Garrett lacks the respect of his wife. The humanist Friel is not an anti-​materialist, yet an anti-​capitalist. His Tom Connelly knows that he needs money in order to live and to write, to realize his task and his talent for the sake of expressing truth. Friel’s dialectic view of truth and untruth is comparable to what Adorno put forth in his influential text ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’.84 Friel’s claim that ‘rural and urban societies’ should compensate one another ‘in mutual balance’85 shows that modern progress and rural tradition are no antipodes; instead, they are a dialectic pair on the basis of tradition and qualitative change, not quantitative exchange, of solidarity and the persistent renewal of truth. ***

83 Murray, Brian Friel, p. 27. 8 4 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’, in Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, pp. 120–​167. 85 Murray, Brian Friel, p. 27.

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Brian Friel and Theodor W. Adorno: Utopia, Dialectics, and Performances

Introduction Art and philosophy are closely related, and both share a dialectical relationship with ordinary life. They arise from it and consciously remain part of it, while at the same time they aim to rise above it. Philosophy does so by projecting counter-​images onto fractured existence, while the aesthetics of art represents the objectification of such counter-​images. According to the Critical Theory of Theodor W. Adorno (1903–​1969) spiritus rector of the Frankfurt School, in both art and philosophy the intellectually graspable and the imaginative and spiritual are dialectically related. While the medium of philosophy is rational thought, which does not categorically preclude the idea of an inconceivable, art involves the irrationality of sensuality and emotion and is yet in need of the rationality of form. Viewed by Adorno as mutually compensating modes of knowledge, art and philosophy are both concerned with truth as the restoration of fractured human existence to wholeness. To this end, neither of them can do without utopia. The imagination of liberating otherness and the longing for its realization is the vitalizing element in an otherwise desperate world. With his Minima Moralia, Adorno, one of the chief representatives of Critical Theory, sent out a message ‘from damaged life’, relating his ‘melancholy science’, an exact stock-​taking of human reality, to ‘a region that from time immemorial was regarded as the field of philosophy … the

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teaching of the good life.’1 The aporetic nature of this aim is obvious: Is the teaching of something that has never been established throughout history not utterly futile? –​at best, a tall story like that of the famous eighteenth-​ century Baron von Münchhausen, who claimed to have pulled himself out of the mire by his own hair? And had Adorno and Max Horkheimer (another prominent member of the Frankfurt School; 1895–​1973) not stated earlier, in their joint work of 1944, that ‘the fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant’?,2 what is ‘the good life’, anyhow? The answer to this question has essentially remained the same since classical antiquity with its aesthetic idea of a kosmos: the good life would mean the balanced relationship between all beings and things. Its verification as the verification of truth would be aesthetic as much as ethical. In the twentieth century, however, philosophy had ultimately to acknowledge that such a balance can only be ambiguous and elusive, that it is an experience of the mind rather than a realizable, permanent outer condition. According to Adornian theory, it is attainable only in the sense of a ‘negative’ dialectics, characterized as the tension between the unfulfillability of the deepest human desires and the sustained hope for their fulfilment.3

Utopia In the age of Renaissance with its rediscovery of the empirical world and the revival of the classical idea of cosmic order, the English statesman and philosopher Thomas More (1478–​1535), focused on political and ethical issues, visualized the ideal of universal well-​being and peace in topographical terms. Yet a closer look detects an ambiguousness in More’s 1 2 3

Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. by E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2002), p. 15. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. by John Cummings (London: Verso, 1997), p. 3. Hartmut Scheible, Theodor W. Adorno (Hamburg: Rororo Bildmonographien Bd. 400, 1996), p. 68.

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ideal world that renders his concept astonishingly modern. With self-​ deprecating humour speaking as a ‘Raphael Nonsensico’, More describes in detail a perfect human community that inhabits the remote island of ‘Utopia’.4 Despite the non-​existence that the name suggests, ‘Utopia’ is recommended as ‘Goplacia’. That only wisemen will find access to it, lends this desired place an air of transcendence. The spiritual character of ‘Goplacia’ is set into contrast with a clearly defined ‘Noplacia’, as More called Plato’s ideal republic. Whether positively impracticable like the Platonic version, or offering if only a faint and partial possibility of verification as More has it –​each of the two divergent conceptions of an ideal state exemplifies the observation of Adorno and Horkheimer that ‘a priori, the citizen sees the world as a matter from which he himself manufactures it.’5 Hence, until far into the twentieth century, utopia as the counter-​image of a troubled world was described in the identifying terms of historical reality. Corrupted as ideology, More’s idea of utopia was even reverted into its contrary for the worldly purpose of political domination, hegemony and totalitarian power systems –​a danger that continues to exist As the name suggests, Utopia, or ‘no place’, resists materialization. And yet, in a dialectical sense, More’s definition of it as ‘Goplacia’ has retained its validity. In late modernity, the influential musicologist, composer, philosopher and cultural critic Adorno, besides other members of the Frankfurt School, is preoccupied with utopia as the possibility to establish peace and well-​being in all fields of human society, while at the same time they are conscious of the inherently human split. Consequently, utopia cannot be other than ambiguous. The impossibility to lastingly establish wholeness is neither accepted nor rejected: an ambiguous stance giving rise to the specific dynamics of utopia. Adorno places its simultaneity of ‘nowhere and now-​here’,6 its being neither palpable reality, nor an absurdity, into a historical, and at the same time a metaphysical context in which truth and identity are central issues. These, too, are key themes in the dramatic 4 5 6

Thomas More, Utopia, trans. by Paul Turner (London: Penguin Books, 2009). Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 91. Cf. Roger Behrens, Adorno-​ABC (Leipzig: Reclam, 2003), p. 214.

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art of Brian Friel, viewed from a standpoint similar to Adorno’s negative dialectics, as the present essay intends to show. To both authors, identity and truth are no monolithic entities but non-​finalities that elude totalizing identification. They are inseparably linked with one another, while together they participate in the idea of utopia. Adorno recognizes a symbol of that triad in the biblical image of the rainbow, reminder and promise of primordial wholeness that eludes human logic.7 The cognition of truth as a moment of ‘realized utopia’8 conveys to the individual mind a peculiar sense of liberation, transmitting it into the no-​man’s-​land where one is neither absolutely free nor alienated from self and other. For a moment, the gap between particular and universal, as well as that between all other opposites seems to be overcome. In that such epiphanous experience affects psyche and physis alike, it enables the individual subject to ‘translate’ it, as a reflection of truth, into ordinary life. Yet it is in works of art that ‘aesthetic experience’ is most poignantly objectified –​not as a totalization, but as the mimetic re-​creation of wholeness that by its inherent dynamics –​its potentiality –​eludes conceptual fixations. What Adorno has called the objectification of the non-​objective through art is to Friel ‘the burden of the incommunicable’.9 The sense of utopian fulfilment that the artist Friel conveys through his plays is imparted through the aesthetic form of his plays, in accordance with the Adornian definition of utopia as ‘the state of distinctness without domination, with the distinct participating in each other.’10 Aesthetically and thematically, Friel’s ‘Theatre of Hope and Despair’ is characterized by the dialectics of communication among his dramatic characters. While their mutual understanding frequently fails, their deficiencies are ‘healed’ aesthetically in that they become necessary constituents in the work of art, whose perfect constellation of the multi-​levelled particulars presents a whole in which 7 8 9 10

Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. by E. B. Ashton (London: Verso, 1997), p. 373. ‘verwirklichte Utopie’, Adorno, ‘Aldous Huxley und die Utopie’, in Gesammelte Schriften 10, 1 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1977), p. 121. Christopher Murray, ed., Brian Friel:  Essays, Diaries, Interviews  –​1964–​1999 (London: Faber & Faber, 1999), p. 68. Brian O’Connor, ed., The Adorno Reader (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 140.

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they all share. To an understanding audience, a character’s fault is truthfully revealed as untruth, thereby evoking in the spectator the image of its unrealized opposite: By showing how things are, the modern work of art creates the utopia of how things ought to be. Aesthetic imagination functions at once as the memory of a balanced world without violence. All of Friel’s characters, in their own, often delusive or illusive ways, are in search of wholeness and happiness, that ‘paradise lost’ which is not lost entirely, as somehow it has left its reflections in every human soul. Often, Friel’s characters themselves have their dialectic counterparts, as for instance the hedge school master Hugh O’Donnell in Translations and his son Owen. Neither of them being in possession of the whole truth, they complement each other on various levels and in various ways. The characters who are totally wrong, are those who seek totality, and even this is relative and does not necessarily mean their total condemnation: they always act out of some context that, however slant it may be, implies the possibility of adjustment. The open endings in Friel’s Theatre of Hope and Despair signal an aporia that is paradoxical rather than absolute; aporia with a secret escape means the cognition that renewal is possible. ‘If what is can be changed, what is, is not all’, as Adorno has formulated the key idea of his metaphysics. It implies the hope and conciliatory attitude that leads to new beginnings. With his artistic devise: ‘(t)o see the thing exactly as it is and then to create it anew’,11 Friel adds possibility to reality, the possibility of change and redemption, conscious that possibility, in that it eludes materialization, remains utopia. For the few characters in Friel’s plays who experience fulfilment as the unity of reality and possibility, it proves a volatile experience, analogous to the shifting sands in the scene of intimate understanding between Maire and the English soldier in Translations. Their moments of love, of ‘realized utopia’, are an escape from a refracted world. Nevertheless, they remain its captives, even its victims, as the play drastically shows. Escape is possible, but it is ambiguous: metaphysical, without existence. Like art, it deals with the confines of factual reality, which it simultaneously transcends. The work of Brian Friel mirrors the author’s acute consciousness 11

Murray, Brian Friel, p. 67.

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that utopia is possible as ‘neither reality nor dreams’,12 and that this magic and ambiguous sphere which Adorno calls ‘negative’ because of its immateriality, is the necessary and fruitful uncertainty that keeps life alive. Friel has defined the human capacity to think the unconditional as ‘imagination, … the only conscience’.13 George Steiner, whose impact on Friel in matters of communicative language and the unspeakable is well-​known, and who in turn is most familiar with the work of Adorno, writes in After Babel: ‘(W)e endure creatively due to our ability to say “No” to reality, to build fictions of alterity of dreamed, or willed, or awaited “otherness” for our consciousness to inhabit.’14 Preponderant in Adorno’s thinking is the mutability and omnipresence of otherness. Hence he has defined his philosophy as ‘the transmutation of metaphysics into history’, that is, ‘into the category of decay’.15 It is as the possibility of renewal that artists make the other accessible to senses and mind alike. As Friel has described the utopian vision of artists: ‘And when they depict in mean, gruesome detail only one portion of our existence … they are crying out for recognition of the existence of something less ignoble, something more worthy.’16 Therefore, quoting Adorno again, ‘in a sublimated sense, reality should imitate the artworks’.17 Utopia, the ‘wordless, imageless’18 third between opposites is the sphere of mediation and peace. As ‘a togetherness of diversity’, it is ‘above identity and above contradiction’, Adorno explains19 –​here using both concepts in the usual, positivistic, rather than a dialectical sense. The metaphysical ‘third’, with its potential for transcendence and recreation, may be compared to Field Day’s imaginative Fifth Province, the utopian ‘crossroads’, where 12 Brian Friel, ‘Among the Ruins’, in Selected Stories (Loughcrew, Co. Meath:  The Gallery Press, 1979), p. 109. 13 Murray, Brian Friel, p. 68. 14 George Steiner, After Babel (Oxford/​New York: OUP, 1992), p. XIV. 15 Negative Dialectics, p. 360. 16 Murray, Brian Friel, p. 24. 17 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. by Robert Hullot-​Kentor (London:  Athlone Press, 1997), p. 132. 18 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 247. 19 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 150.

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different directions or entities intersect and coincide with one another. To the travellers from opposite points of departure, who find themselves at the same stage, it is a place of arrival and departure, of re-​orientation and decision. Like Utopia, the Fifth Province of the Mind is conceived as the ambivalent field of difference and unity, of joyful relief and (self-​) critical reflection. A peaceful balance of the diverse is never without tension, by which it is at once sustained and jeopardized. In ‘The Theatre of Hope and Despair’, Friel shows acute awareness of the simultaneity of stability and precariousness in the arts, when he writes that they must ‘take fright’ of ‘the apparent permanence –​that they themselves have created’ and in continuing search must ‘move to a new location’.20 It is the search for that which has not yet materialized. Convergingly, Adorno states that ‘artworks are not being, but a process of becoming.’21 And, with a stronger hint at the utopian character of art, he elsewhere writes that ‘because art is what it has become, its concept refers to what it does not contain’.22 In accordance with his friend Walter Benjamin, Adorno regards the work of art as a moment of ‘standstill’ of its ‘immanent process’, which he compares to Lessing’s notion of a ‘pregnant moment’.23 Adorno’s central demand of philosophical thought and art alike, to negate negation without setting a position,24 transcends formal logics. Equally illogical is his dialectic motto of ‘identity of the non-​identical’.25 Again in Translations, Friel has dramatized the same ideas, particularly in the episode when the Irishman Owen /​‘Roland’ and the British soldier Yolland euphorically ‘roll about, their lines overlap(ping)’.26 Their figures appear as two in one, suggesting a mind as one in two, while their difference is yet recognizable. What caused their exhilaration is Owen’s declaration of his real name, while up to then he had responded to its foreign corruption. Following his visit to his Irish homeland, Owen’s final insistence on 20 2 1 22 23 24 25 26

Murray, Brian Friel, p. 16. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 176. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 3. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 84. Cf. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 406. Adorno Negative Dialectics, p. 364. Brian Friel, Translations, in Selected Plays (London: Faber & Faber, 1990), p. 421.

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being called by his real name signals the questionable middleman’s sudden awareness of his true identity, his specific truth as a part of a tribal and cultural whole, but also as a member of the human race that enables him to hold constructive communication with members of other nations and cultures. Inwardly and outwardly having come into his own, Owen now literally and metaphorically speaks two languages. With art being ‘magic delivered from the lie of being truth’, as Adorno has put it,27 Friel never sets positions. Janus-​like, his view implies the opposites, making him abstain from concrete judgements: ‘there can be no verdicts, no answers’, is Daisy’s liberating conclusion in Give Me Your Answer, Do.28 Truth and identity, as Translations suggests on various levels, must ever be recreated in a continuous process of confrontation and mediation, of confusion and clarification, rather than being a fixed and hence a diminishing (self-​) image. This insight is mirrored in the individual’s attitude towards language. When speaking of the imprisoning power of language,29 Owen’s father, the multilingual hedge school master and integrating personality, Hugh, implicitly refers to language as expression of the mind beyond conceptual limitations. As Adorno has formulated, ‘language becomes a measure of truth only when we are conscious of the non-​identity of an expression with that which we mean.’30 The consciousness of the necessity and simultaneous insufficiency of communicative language as an instrument for the cognition of truth enables the mind to transcend verbal significations and to listen to the silent whole of something that words can only approach in constellations. The inner freedom gained by the ability to discern and transcend false division lines does not eliminate error and uncertainty; it also means the freedom to fail. That Owen’s and Yolland’s high spirits are stimulated by 27 28 29 30

Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 222. Original version: ‘Kunst ist Magie, befreit von der Lüge, Wahrheit zu sein’, in Minima Moralia (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1969), p. 298. Brian Friel, Give Me Your Answer, Do (Loughcrew, Co. Meath: Gallery Press, 1997), p. 79. Cf. Friel, Selected Plays, p. 419. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 111.

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poteen, adds a moment of fallaciousness to their enthusiasm. Yet despite its ambiguity, Owen’s momentary experience of self-​identity is of vital importance to him. It marks a new beginning rather than an end. ‘Experience,’ as Martin Jay has explained its specifically Adornian signification, ‘comes only with an encounter of otherness in which the self no longer remains the same.’31 The dialectic unity of hope and despair informs Adorno’s theory as much as it permeates the work of Friel, preventing each of these two inner conditions from destructive absoluteness. Rather, it lends the equanimity and steadfastness that Albrecht Wellmer has described as ‘the spirit of reconciliation in an unreconciled world’.32 In 1982, in interview with Fintan O’Toole, Friel contrasted a desirable ‘cultural whole’ with the ‘hole’, in which he saw his divided people compelled to live.33 The playwright’s preoccupation is with the resentment and hostility between the extremists on both conflicting sides that creates, and in turn is reinforced by the current atrocities. The war-​like situation in the Northern Ireland of the 1970s and 1980s exhibited the still unhealed wounds of British colonialism, and induced committed artists like Brian Friel to evoke, through the inarticulate and therefore universal language of art, the experience of transcendence in the minds of individuals and audiences of both conflicting parties. Through the balanced constellation of all its constituents, the play would speak to both the audience’s senses and intellect, giving voice to the critical point between destruction and salvation. Friel is well aware that the translation of aesthetic experience into practice, should it happen at all, can neither be complete, nor final. If it does happen, the extraordinary, ecstatic experience of realized utopia, appropriately described by Friel in the negative as ‘neither reality nor dreams’,34 impels individuals to acts of reconciliation and renewal. The fragility and 31 32 33 34

Martin Jay, ‘Is Experience Still in Crisis? Reflections on a Frankfurt School Lament’, in Tom Huhn, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Adorno (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 140. Albrecht Wellmer, Zur Dialektik von Moderne und Postmoderne:  Vernunftkritik nach Adorno (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1983), p. 142 (my translation). See Murray, Brian Friel, p. 113. Friel, Selected Stories. p. 109.

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transitoriness of such acts, reflections of that intermediate realm between completeness and transition, express utopia as a dynamics. Total identities, the total congruence of dreams and reality would mean total standstill; the congruence of theory and practice cannot rid itself of its contradiction which Friel has termed ‘necessary uncertainty’,35 and which to Adorno is ‘possibility’. What the latter has said of art, equally applies to contingent life: ‘If the utopia of art were fulfilled, it would be art’s temporal end.’36

The Utopia of Art and the Language of Music Friel’s impressive metaphor for utopia as the ungraspable link between contingency and the absolute is the magical sound of the bells of Kitezh. That legendary Russian city, image of paradise beyond existence, vanished from the sight of its assailants, leaving its audible traces to those with ears to hear as testimony of its indestructible truth and promise of its invisible presence. ‘That sacred song is the only momentary stay we have against confusion’, Friel states in ‘Seven Notes for a Festival Programme’.37 Its seeming immateriality renders sound elusive and yet pervasive. Viewed aesthetically, the rhythmical sound of bells ringing, or the melodious rhythm of music, as airy object entering a subject’s mind sensuously through the ear, suggests freedom and metaphysical otherness. Such a sound parallels the inarticulate language of art in a triple sense: (1) as the nonconceptual, equivocal voice of an object; (2) as a subject’s act of sounding the object’s hidden depths –​its truth –​through both empathy and critical reflection whereby, (3) both subject and object are momentarily made whole and sound. ‘Knowledge has no other light but that shed on the world by redemption. All else is reconstruction, mere technique’, as Adorno concludes his Minima Moralia.38 The same irenic idea is implicit in Friel’s 35 36 37 38

Friel, Give Me Your Answer, Do, p. 79. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 32. Murray, Brian Friel, p. 180. Murray, Brian Friel, p. 247.

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succinct statement that ‘life is all we have’.39 Friel’s self-​interpretation as an artist may be perceived in the words of his artist figure in Performances: ‘We … sing what we hear by the language of feeling itself; a unique vocabulary of sounds created by feeling itself.’40 To both Friel and Adorno art is a mode of knowledge, focused on emotion. The medium of philosophy, on the other hand, is intellect. To show that the one is void without the other, has been Adorno’s life-​long endeavour. His claim that ‘in a sublimated sense, life should imitate the artworks’41 dialectically unites emotion and rationality as, in Adornian terms, ‘aesthetic comportment’, or as Friel calls it, as ‘feeling’. It would verify the notion of utopia as the peaceful togetherness of what is diverse. The artist’s ‘happiness of producing the world once over’42 lies in the configuration of the elements of a work so that together they are more than their sum. Through this unfixable, indescribable ‘more’ the presented object is given its voice, its unmistakable and yet ambivalent sound. Speaking of ‘the burden of the incommunicable’,43 Friel shows the laborious side of artistic creation, while he is equally conscious of the redemptive character of the artists’ efforts to recreate wholeness through their depiction of brokenness. ‘The very act of taking care to say what can be said shows another silent realm beyond language (and logic) and so beyond description’, Friel entered into his ‘Sporadic Diary’ while composing Give Me Your Answer, Do.44 He is referring to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, as is Adorno’s statement that ‘art is an entity that is not identical with its empiria. What is essential to art is that which in it is not the case.’45 ‘Music and philosophy attempt to say the unsayable’, the philosopher and musical artist Adorno observes in his notebook of 1962,46 and 39 0 4 41 42 43 44 45 46

Murray, Brian Friel, p. 31. Brian Friel, Performances (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Books, 2003), p. 31. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 132. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 335. Murray, Brian Friel, p. 68. Murray, Brian Friel, p. 167. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 335. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Graeculus (I): Musikalische Notizen’, Frankfurter Adorno-​ Blätter VII (1999), 9–​36 (p. 32); my translation.

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he explains that both are aimed to liberate language from the abstracting concept, the one achieving it through self-​reflection, the other through its non-​conceptuality. Evidently for the same reasons, Friel has ruled out any specific philosophy or concept of life underlying his work. Instead, he communicates the incommunicable solely through his plays, in which music increasingly serves to express the unfixable dynamics of life and to turn reality into the experience of utopian possibility. ‘Music’, Adorno writes in his notes, ‘assists the poem against the poem’s fallibility’.47 The impulses that music takes up from the poem are turned into categories of form, which in turn have their effects on the poem. A similar function of music can be discovered in Friel’s plays, not considering the special relation between drama and music as performing arts: both come to real life by being played. The ‘peculiar transcendence’ that Adorno attributes to music means that ‘music is not transcendent, but it transcends.’ By its own insubstantiality, music reinforces the play’s non-​significative language, its unspeakable ‘more’ and transforms it into illuminating, aesthetic experience. It uplifts and liberates the soul with which it is intimately related in character. Music, according to Adorno, is ‘the mimesis of soul and infinity.’48 At a difficult stage in his work on ‘the blind play’ Molly Sweeney, Friel is explicit about the affinity between mind and music. ‘You are the music While the music lasts’, he quotes from T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets in his diary, and he admonishes himself to ‘approach’ his subject ‘more easily, more openly, not schematically’, to ‘allow it to flow easily through’ him.49 A decade later, in Performances, one of his late works, Friel would make the artist’s relation to his work his main theme with music standing for ‘the strict and pure concept of art’, to borrow Adorno’s formulation.50 Now music is no longer just an assisting and complementary factor in the performing arts –​‘a symbolic presence and a structural resource’, as Harry White has

47 48 49 50

Adorno, Frankfurter Adorno-​Blätter VII, p. 23, my translation. Adorno, Frankfurter Adorno-​Blätter VII, p. 27, my translation. Murray. Brian Friel, p. 158. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. By E. F. N. Jephcott (London/​New York: Verso, 2002), p. 223.

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shown with regard to Friel’s previous plays.51 In Performances, music is in itself what it presents on stage: the expression of fulfilled utopia. ‘Thank God, my first language was music. And a much more demanding language it is, too’, Friel has his artist figure, the Czech composer Leoš Janácek, say.52 By its elusive completeness that transmits identity without identifications, musical art presents the essence of all art in that it ‘speaks in a fashion that is denied to the natural objects and the subjects who make them’.53

Performances as the Realization of Utopia? In his book The Theatre of Brian Friel, Christopher Murray informs the reader that it was Michael Colgan, director of the Dublin Gate Theatre who, in 2002, drew Brian Friel’s attention to the collection of more than seven hundred love letters by the Czech composer Leoš Janácek (1854–​ 1928). The letters were addressed to Kamila Stösslovà, the young married woman who, following her first encounter with Janácek in 1917, became the composer’s inspiration until his final days. In 1928, Janácek gave his last and consummate work, the Second String Quartet, the subtitle of Intimate Letters. As Colgan had surmised, Friel did perceive theatrical potential in the relation between the written documents of the elderly composer’s passion for the woman half his age, and the artistic heightening of his verbalized emotions into the all-​encompassing language of music. As Murray reports, theatrical interest meant to Friel that he would deviate from the common opinion that sees in the String Quartet No. 2 a direct translation of the love letters into music so that the one can be read or listened to parallel to the other.54 That equation Friel would leave to the Harry White, ‘Brian Friel and the Condition of Music’, Irish University Review (Special Issue: Brian Friel) 29/​1 (1999), 6–​15 (p. 7). 52 Friel, Performances, p. 31. 53 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 5. 54 See Christopher Murray, The Theatre of Brian Friel:  Tradition and Modernity (London/​New Delhi/​New York/​Sidney: Methuen Drama, 2014), p. 179.

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dramatic challenger of his artist figure, the doctoral student Anezka Ungrova. Described by the Frielian Janácek as ‘anxious’, ‘intense’, ‘dogged’, and ‘very persistent’, she indeed is used to thinking in terms of positivistic identification. The play shows Anezka in discussion with the composer at his metaphorical home, located between all identifying concepts such as past, present, reality, imagination, life, death, young, and old. The actual stage becomes the utopian space where life’s paradoxes are both reviewed and dialectically resolved; it becomes the magical and vital centre, where music gives voice to the liberating ‘third’. Employing the performance of music as a vital constituent of his theatrical play, Friel highlights music and drama as the two performing arts that are based on the mutuality between individual and collective, a relation that is reconfirmed with every new performance. But in the first place, Friel explores the enigmatic power behind the creation of art and emanating from it. Performances presents music as the paradigm of the aesthetic language of all the arts, the nonconceptual language in which all contradictions are mutually and recreatively reconciled. Words are joined with melody, thought with action, intellect with emotion; ultimately, knowledge is joined with eros, to put it in Adornian terms.55 Each dialectic pair speaks of something greater than both its constituents. Friel seems to be keenly aware that the nonverbal element needs the word in order to impart itself to human consciousness. As his Janácek says of the juxtaposition of the love letters and love’s musical expression: both can be ‘held in a kind of equilibrium. Even be seen to illuminate one another.’56 They are never an exclusive ‘either-​or’. During the conversation between the Frielian Janácek and his young critic, relevant parts of the Second String Quartet are played on the piano by the composer himself, or performed by a group of enthusiastic young musicians. Through their play, the unsayable behind the love letters becomes audible on and beyond the stage. By their devotion and mimetic capability, which requires both understanding and technical skill, the musicians are interpreters of the work: mediators between artist and audience, the 55 56

See Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 331. Friel, Performances, p. 38.

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artist and his work, the work and its recipients. The Frielian Janácek aptly calls his players his ‘life-​support’.57 In contrast with the musicians’ joyful commitment to their play, the academic Anezka is obviously seeking the composer’s consent to her conviction: ‘My thesis will demonstrate that the Second String Quartet is a textbook example of a great passion inspiring a great work of art.’58 Although her idea contains some truth, it is not the whole truth, as the play theatrically and musically reveals. It is true that the Second String Quartet is the intonation of Janácek’s spiritual climax at the end of his physical and artistic life, a sublimation of feelings that renders sexual performance with Kamila after all irrelevant. In that the composer’s intense emotions assume aesthetic form, Janácek is relieved from their pressure. Instead, he experiences a moment of utopian wholeness, ‘a great longing and something like a fulfilment of that longing’.59 Anezka’s citation of a key passage from the love letters evokes in the artist that unwritten ‘more’ behind the words. He vividly remembers his one intimate meeting with Kamila at his holiday home in Hukvaldy. Unexpectedly, the scene of extreme emotional tension had led to an experience of redemption and fulfilment. The composer’s inner turmoil had settled, clarified to ‘a few minutes of sudden peace –​no longer –​an amnesty sent from above maybe’. At once the ephemeral sense of wholeness had translated itself into the mimetic language of art: ‘(A)nd this fragment came to me, a little melodic tendril. Trivial, I know. But I remember placing those limpid notes on the page with such care, so delicately, as if they were fragile.’60 The final movement of the Second String Quartet, titled ‘I’ll Wait for You’, is the composer’s manifestation of hope and steadfastness. Betraying acceptance of the aporetic human condition and the simultaneous knowledge of a secret escape, it might even be perceived as a reflection of the three divine virtues Faith, Hope and Love. (See 1 Corinthians 13) ‘To think the unconditional and to endure the conditional’:61 Adorno has formulated 57 58 59 60 61

Friel, Performances, p. 28. Friel, Performances, p. 22. Friel, Performances, p. 24. Friel, Performances, p. 24. Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 238.

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what to him is the ultimate level of human consciousness and conduct, as a seeming paradox. Samuel Beckett, to whom Adorno had intended to dedicate his consummate work Aesthetic Theory,62 has his anti-​hero Victor –​ nomen est omen –​utter a similar idea at the end of Eleuthéria: ‘I’ll never be free. (Pause) But I feel myself ceaselessly becoming so.’63 ‘We dream about paradise and we never get to it. … I know, don’t I, I’ll never have you’: Friel entered these words from Janácek’s letter into his ‘Notes to Performances’.64 They do not appear in the play, as it is the artwork itself that offers liberation from reality’s limitations. Conscious that it cannot be the absolute itself, the artist recreates the unconditional mimetically, mutually ‘approximating thing and expression to the point where the difference fades’, to quote Adorno’s definition of negative dialectics.65 Friel’s Janácek therefore rightly affirms that ‘the work’s the thing’.66 The work rings the bell of wholeness and peace, even if portraying the opposite. While the young researcher Anezka sees in Janácek’s ‘great passion’ for Kamila the cause of his ‘great work’, the true passion of Friel’s artist is for the absolute. That it can only be realized ambiguously, is the impulse not solely of Friel’s play, but of all true art. Literally imparting itself to the particular mind, the absolute is received as an undefineable ‘neither –​nor’ –​Friel’s ‘neither reality nor dreams’. Like the dramatist himself, his musical artist Janácek knows well that only through the creative potential inherent in the interplay between reality and possibility, between the particular and the universal, the knowable and the unknowable, does the work become ‘the thing realized’, ‘(t)he aspiration fulfilled’.67 With the Second String Quartet, Janácek had given expression to his crucial experience of truth, which ultimately remains ungraspable and enigmatic. ‘Cognition that wants truth, wants utopia. This, the consciousness of possibility, adheres to the concrete as its undisfigured other’:68 Adorno’s statement may serve to explain the 2 Due to Adorno’s premature death in 1969, the work has remained unfinished. 6 63 Samuel Beckett, Eleutheria, trans. by Michael Brodsky (New York:  Foxrock Incorporation, 1995), p. 184. 64 Brian Friel Archive, MS 49, 253/​3. National Library of Ireland, Dublin. 65 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 56. 66 Friel, Performances, p. 38. 67 Friel, Performances, p. 34. 68 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 56, my translation.

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fulfilment Friel’s Janácek had been longing for and which, for a few decisive moments, he had attained. In the happiness he felt, spiritual experience and aesthetic expression coincided. It was the happiness at giving expression to inexpressible wholeness which in real life had overwhelmed him in the person of a particular woman, Kamila Stösslovà: ‘And that (music off ) is the closest he ever got to the dream sounds in his head’ … And in time the distinction between his dreams and that young woman became indistinguishable, so that in his head she was transformed into something immeasurably greater –​of infinitely more importance than the quite young modest woman she was, in fact. Indeed, in time he came to see her –​miraculously –​as the achieved thing in itself ! The music in the head made real, become carnal!69

Anezka is upset at Janácek’s assertion that he had ‘invented’ Kamila, ‘as an expression of what was the best in him’.70 But was not the best in him just this longing for wholeness, the unattainability of which taunted him and simultaneously spurred him to its artistic re-​creation? Friel’s utopian artist is clearly aware of the dangers that this equivocalness implies. While Anezka apparently has not noticed Janácek’s sudden reference to himself as ‘he’, a receptive audience perceives in it the artist’s self-​assessment in the clarity lent by distance71 –​not just the distance of time, but a new, redemptive state of mind. Janácek’s problems of the past have now been resolved. His ‘emotion recollected in tranquillity’, to use T. S. Eliot’s phrase,72 forms an integral part of his state of transformation. And while the composer’s imperfections as a contingent being assimilate him to Kamila, she in turn is ennobled by her ‘eminent’ aesthetic sensibility: ‘She understood that from the very beginning: the work came first.’73

69 70 71 72

73

Friel, Performances, p. 34, my emphasis. Friel, Performances, p. 34. See Friel, Performances, p. 31. T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in Frank Kermode, ed., Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), p. 43. I am grateful for the reminder by Christopher Murray that T. S. Eliot in turn borrowed the phrase from Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical Ballads. Friel, Performances, p. 38.

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Towards the end of Performances, the ultimate stage where discrepancies arise and are resolved is shown to be the artist’s mind itself –​though with the essential difference that his inner gaps have already been healed. In his state of self-​transcendence, Friel’s Janácek recalls his failures from a redemptive point of view where self-​criticism, turned into self-​knowledge, is no longer tormenting. As Adorno writes in ‘Finale’, the concluding paragraph of Minima Moralia: ‘Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption.’74 The world –​exterior and interior –​‘with its rifts and crevices’ is viewed ‘without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with its objects.’ To verify this utopian ‘Goplacia’ is the purpose of the work of art and, though in a different way, of a humane life. In Friel’s play, Janácek’s sense of fulfilment is infinite rather than a transient experience, and yet it is not absolute. His past, though transcended, stays with him. Once he had thought that with the composition of ‘Intimate Letters’, he ‘had solved the great paradox: had created something that was similar to me, uniquely mine … made new again in every listener who was attentive and assented to this strange individuality.’75 While he now lives in the otherworld, he has opened himself up to the world of the other. He recognizes that his music is no longer alive through him, but that he is alive through his work, which in turn is subject to interpretation, and hence to re-​creation with every new performance. The work, in itself a ‘unity of the diverse’, mutually unites author, players and recipients in that it speaks to each individually in the language of universal wholeness. It thereby promises that wholeness is possible –​as ‘neither reality, nor dreams.’ ‘Play –​ play –​play!’, one of the musicians reminds her fellow players at the end of Performances, joined by the ‘Work –​work –​work!’ of another member of the quartet. Their impatience indicates their enthusiasm as much as their will to commit themselves to the ambivalence of their journey into re-​creation. It demands discipline and perseverance combined with mutual empathy. To unfold the musical sounds one needs to ‘think with one’s ears’, as Adorno famously described that immaterial union of emotion and

74 75

Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 247. Friel, Performances, p. 31.

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intellect in true understanding.76 T. S. Eliot’s lines from Four Quartets, ‘you are the music/​while the music lasts’77 are here compatible with the dialectics of identity through the non-​identical. In the happiness created in such moments, the momentary conflates with eternity. Already in 1993, Friel had entered Freud’s advice into his Sporadic Diary: ‘The final therapy is work and love.’78 Eros as the creative life force necessitates the rationality of cognition. ‘I’ll Wait for You’, the final movement of the Second String Quartet, does not mean passive subjection, but the faith that utopia can be fulfilled. As ambiguous reflection of the absolute, it requires humans to play their mediating and redemptive part, in both thought and action.

Conclusion One could almost perceive some metaphoric implication in the fact that Brian Friel came into this world just a few months after Leoš Janácek had left it. As indicated above, this would not allow for a mechanical transposition of ‘Intimate Letters’ into theatre. According to the Adornian conception of tradition, a thing is preserved in that it is changed, transferred into a changed context, with the respective reactions of all parts forming a new whole. Friel has perceived in the relation between the Czech composer’s verbal and musical ‘manifesto of love’ a problem whose epistemological and aesthetic relevance did not become generally acute until in late modernity. Not only did Friel translate the personal crisis (which is, of course, inseparable from the ruling socio-​historical conditions) of an artist of the nineteenth/​twentieth century into the uncertainties and paradoxicalities of the twentieth/​twenty-​first century, but he also enacted mimetically and artistically the only possible solution 76 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Der getreue Korepetitor’, in Theodor W. Adorno and Hanns Eissler, Kompositionen für den Film Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, Bd. 15 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1997), p. 184. 77 T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (London: Faber & Faber, 2001), p. 30. 78 Murray, Brian Friel, p. 158.

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‘in face of despair’,79 namely love as work, work as love: open-​ended processes in the endeavour to realize on earth the possibility of wholeness. With Performances, Friel ‘playfully’ bridges the gap between the sayable and the unsayable, the finite and the infinite. His actual performance of the utopia of art exemplifies Adorno’s aphoristic statement: ‘Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.’80 Besides the dialectics of continuation and change with regard to the two works in question, there is a biographical coincidence of some significance. Friel wrote Performances at the age of seventy-​four, the age at which Janácek began and completed his consummate composition. Both works are characterized by ‘late style’ (Spätstil) that Adorno, in a radio discussion in 1966, described as ‘increasing spiritualization (Vergeistigung) of the sensual’ in a process of clarification. A growing sense of disruption becomes the source of artistic production.81 What for Friel may have been a factor in his interest in the person and late work of Janácek, has informed his own theatre from the beginning. And yet, in contrast to the doubtful faith healer Frank Hardy who even through his ultimate self-​sacrifice has not really attained redemption, the artist figure of Performances lives on in his music, ‘the mimesis of soul and infinity’. Thus recalling the truth of reconciliation, he is himself reconciled.

79 8 0 81

See Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 247. Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 222. Theodor W. Adorno and Hans Mayer, ‘Über Spätstil in Musik und Literatur: Ein Rundfunkgespräch’, Frankfurter Adorno-​Blätter VII (no date), 135–​145 (139), my translation.

Chapter 4

‘The Truth About Hedda Gabler’: Ibsen’s Play, Brian Friel’s ‘Version’, and Adorno’s Reflections

According to the Scottish theatre critic, William Archer (1856–​1924), the outrageous act of Henrik Ibsen’s (1828–​1906) Hedda Gabler of burning Eilert Loevborg’s manuscript of what was to be his groundbreaking book on the future of society and culture, had a model in contemporary life. The rumour that ‘the wife of a well-​known Norwegian composer, in a fit of raging jealousy excited by her husband’s prolonged absence from home, burnt the manuscript of a symphony which he had just finished’1 inspired Ibsen to a play about a similar case in the same social and cultural context that made such desperate, destructive reactions possible. The result was a timeless character study, precise and gripping, written with deep psychological insight and composed with superb theatrical skill. Focused on the central character, the newly wed Hedda, the play is equally concerned with her closest social environment, a network of mutual psychological and social influences. At the same time, this intricate web mirrors the tensions which characterize the transition to modernity during the second half of the nineteenth century. Depicting an era of fundamental changes in all fields of life, Ibsen’s play has retained its relevance throughout the ensuing decades up to the great indeterminacies and uncertainties of postmodernity.

1

William Archer, Introduction to Hedda Gabler (Maylada Classic Publisher, 2021), ISBN: 9798515519438, pp. 4–​5.

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‘Fin de siècle’ as ‘Belle Époque’: Expression of the Dialectic of Life and Death Beginning in the late eighteenth century, the Industrial Revolution gradually destabilized the existent social structures, putting traditional values to a crucial test. While the majority of the population more or less took advantage of the technical innovations, the relative minority of intellectuals and artists was acutely aware that the new economic and social developments brought with them a radical change of values, morally, culturally and aesthetically. New movements emerged, and while they differed in theory and practice, they all were aimed at the liberation from traditional customs and beliefs that  –​to borrow Brian Friel’s formulation in Translations (1979)  –​‘no longer matched the landscape of … fact’.2 The usual consequences of the critique of the status quo are contradictory: progressive and conservative. On the one hand, people became experimental and inventive, while others anxiously insisted on what was well-​established and supposedly secure. Hence, the rapid changes in ordinary life were a challenge to some and a threat to others. Besides the discrepancy between values which marked the nineteenth century, few among the contemporary intellectuals were intensely conscious of the actual ambiguity of the fin de siècle. Ibsen indicates the ideological split by having the writer Loevborg speculate about the future, while his rival-​ friend Jörgen Tesman is preoccupied with ‘the domestic crafts of medieval Brabant’.3 But just as in the end the extremes are mutually reconciled, the entire play suggests ambivalence. Only postmodernist thinking –​Adorno being one of its masterminds –​bridged, on a broad cultural level, the intellectual gap between opposites that formerly were considered irreconcilable. Albrecht Wellmer calls it the particular merit of Adorno to have explored the ambiguities of modernity, its aesthetic and communicative potentials, and simultaneously the possibility of a general decline of 2 3

Brian Friel, Translations (London/​Boston: Faber & Faber, 1989), p. 43. Brian Ibsen, Four Major Plays, trans. by James McFarlaine (Oxford: OUP, 1998), p. 175.

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culture.4 In Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, Adorno recognized the inner tensions of the modern age reflected in the situation and individuality of a female character. Her search of beauty, a misunderstanding of life, resulting in lonely death, is counterposed by an immaterial, conciliatory sense of beauty derived from the creative work in togetherness.

The Woman Question Reflecting Man’s Problem, and the Factor of Individuality Ibsen himself neither intended to write a social critique nor to ‘deal with so-​called problems’. He rather made it clear that he ‘principally wanted to depict human beings, human emotions, and human destinies.’ And yet, the ‘groundwork of the social conditions of the present day’,5 on which his characters are modelled, must also be viewed as part of the age-​old patriarchic system which in the nineteenth century began to be interrogated. The materialism of the increasingly technologized world opened up a new dimension of man’s domination over man as well as over nature. The latter comprised woman, reduced to the physicality of body, while man heightened himself as mind.6 The attempt to justify male superiority over woman led to pseudo-​scientific explanations like that of the then influential German neurologist, Paul Julius Möbius (1853–​1907), author of the book On the Physiological and Mental Deficiency of Woman (1900). Hedda Gabler contains all aspects of the subordinated role of woman as man’s servant, childbearer, ornament, erotic object, and protective mother. Yet as every thesis calls forth its antithesis, patriarchism has roused opposition in the form of feminist movements. ‘Woman cannot 4 5 6

See Albrecht Wellmer, ‘Wahrheit, Schein, Versohnung’, in Ludwig von Friedeburg and Jürgen Habermas, eds, Adorno-​konferenz 1983 (Frankfurt a. M.:  Suhrkamp, 1983), p. 138. Archer, ‘Introduction’, in Hedda Gabler, pp. 1–​2. Still in the Germany of the 1950s, the present author was thus instructed, as a 13-​ year-​old, in her Protestant religious lessons.

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be herself in modern society’, Ibsen stated with reference to his earlier play, A Doll’s House (1878).7 Repression of personal identity lies at the bottom of all the problems Hedda causes to herself and to others, making her at once victim and perpetrator. When Fintan O’Toole, in his article ‘A Hundred Years of Heddas’,8 discusses international productions of the play and their various interpretations of its leading character, he simultaneously confirms the abiding actuality of a fundamental problem of modern society,9 of which female emancipation is a prominent issue. In 1907, William Archer had called Hedda ‘an international type, a product of civilization by no means peculiar to Norway’.10 And still in 1944, during his American exile Adorno, acutely conscious of the close entanglement of male and female problems, noted that ‘the feminine character, and the ideal of femininity on which it is modeled, are products of masculine society’.11 Concerned with ‘the portrayal of human beings’12 in general, Ibsen’s play accordingly communicates the idea that restrictive patriarchal social systems are impairing women and men alike. Neither Tesman, nor Loevborg, nor the smart and self-​assured bon-​vivant, Judge Brack, are capable of establishing a mature relationship with a woman on the basis of full personal and gender equality. Freedom as male freedom in fact means unfreedom.

7 8 9

1 0 11 12

Quoted in: ‘Ibsen on Hedda Gabler’, Programme to Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler in a new Version by Brian Friel, directed by Anna Mackmin, premièred as the Gate Theatre, Dublin, 30 September 2008. Fintan O’Toole, in: Programme note to Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, in a translation by Una Ellis-​Fermor, directed by Deborah Warner, premièred at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin on 25 June 1991. See for instance the productions of the play at the National Theatre, London, December 2016, directed by Ivo van Hove; or the most recent production of Ibsen’s Hedda, directed by Mateja Koleznik at Schauspielhaus, Frankfurt am Main, January 2022. Archer, ‘Introduction’, p. 4. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia:  Reflections from Damaged Life (1944), trans. by E. F. N. Jephcott (London/​New York: Verso, 2002), §59, p. 95. Ibsen on Hedda Gabler, in: Programme note, 2008, Gate Theatre.

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That Hedda, in Ibsen’s words, ‘wants to live the whole life of a man’13 would be a fatal misunderstanding of female emancipation. Closed in by her self-​centredness, women’s rights or any other social issue are not Hedda’s concern. What she is longing for is to exert the power over others that she sees conceded to men, of which her deceased father, a former general, is her prime example. ‘For once in my life I want to feel that I control a human destiny,’14 she frankly tells her antipode, Thea Elvsted. Thea’s devotion to Loevborg, whom Hedda still idealizes as a paradigm of individual freedom, has given Thea ‘a sort of control’15 over the writer’s actually unsettled character. Thea’s ‘control’ as anchor and inspiration is constructive and liberating rather than restrictive. In contrast to the anxious, and yet self-​reliant Thea, Hedda derives her doubtful self-​esteem from her mixture of imperial conduct and female finesse. As Ibsen confirms, he conceived Hedda ‘rather as her father’s daughter than as her husband’s wife’.16 Being the only child of a widowed general, and presumably with a good portion of unfulfilled oedipal desire, she compensates a deep-​seated sense of insecurity with her clever manipulations of people. Using her late father’s firearms Hedda, mockingly yet latently in earnest, threatens those whom she admires with death, just as she once had threatened to burn the beautiful hair of her former schoolmate Thea. It proves her inability to change: rather than identifying with her new role as Tesman’s wife, she remains Hedda Gabler, the General’s daughter. Controlling and giving orders was his duty, as was his readiness to kill –​at least in defence. The familiarity with the idea of death, her early life in the barracks, the social constraints of her time have given Hedda the feeling that ‘life does not live’.17 At the same time See:  ‘Ibsen on Hedda Gabler’ in:  Programme of Hedda Gabler in a Version of Brian Friel. 14 Ibsen, Four Major Plays, p. 226. 15 Ibid., p. 190. 16 Archer, ‘Introduction’, p. 1. 17 The phrase by Ferdinand Kürnberger (1821–​1879) Theodor W. Adorno chose as motto to his Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1944). See: Adorno, Minima Moralia. Ferdinand Kürnberger’s book Der Amerika-​Müde (1855) deals with the disappointment of the poet Nikolaus Lenau by what he experienced as an uncultured, materialistic America. 13

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they paradoxically stimulate her ‘lust for life’18 which, in that it remains unsatisfied, reinforces her destructive tendencies –​a vicious circle. In his ‘Thoughts about Hedda Gabler’ the Belgian theatre director Ivo van Hove draws, after all, a less negative picture of Hedda: ‘It took me some time before I started to understand that hidden behind this demonic Hedda burnt an enormous need to live, a real urge.’19

Hedda: A Failed Existentialist? Van Hove interprets Ibsen’s play from a postmodern point of view as ‘existentialist’. For him, Hedda is a person in ‘search for the meaning of life, unsympathetically, seeking the truth’.20 But is Hedda really concerned with truth? If so, it is a subjective truth and therefore delusive. Neither does it comply with the conception of truth held by twentieth-​century existentialism. For although Hedda’s contempt for ‘the usual anxieties of the bourgeoisie’ and her disdain for the conventions of a philistine society are thematic in existentialism, her negation of life as ‘pitiful’ and ‘ludicrous’21 differs from the positive outlook of existentialism. While her subjectivity may be compatible with Sartre’s ‘first principle of existentialism’ that ‘man is nothing else but what he makes of himself ’,22 her existential decisions result from despair and remain desperate; they are not the free choice of an independent individual. Hedda lacks the courage to change ‘the paltry circumstances’ she has ‘landed up in’.23 Her quotation of the popular saying ‘as one makes one’s bed one must lie on it’24 18 Ibsen, Four Major Plays, p. 219. 19 Ivo van Hove, From Shakespeare to David Bowie (London:  Methuen Drama, 2019), p. 40. 20 Ibid., p. 42. 21 Ibid., p. 208. 22 Excerpt from Existentialism, in: Paul Sartre, Existentialism and Human Emotions (New York: Philosophical Library, 1957), p. 15. 23 Ibid., p. 208. 24 Ibid., p. 207.

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is indicative of failure and resignation, rather than of constructive self-​ realization; it evades the personal responsibility which true freedom requires, in fact, she categorically rejects all responsibility.25 In a rare instant of self-​reflection she accepts Loevborg’s conclusion: ‘At bottom you’re a coward.’26 ‘What man ought to be as such is never more than what he has been: he is chained to the rock of his past. He is not only what he was and is, however, but equally what he can come to be, and to anticipate that, no definition suffices’,27 is Adorno’s critical response to the existentialist postulate of the supremacy of subjectivity with its exclusion of negativity as the incalculable, ungraspable, uncontrollable. Hedda’s totalizing thinking is the reverse side of her fear of otherness; it renders her psychically incapable of communication and makes her unproductive and desolate. (That it may or may not parallel her physical state, as against expectations of the time she is not with child, will be a point of discussion below.) Caught in an impasse between bourgeois tradition which she rejects, but to which she nevertheless submits for fear of scandal, Hedda after all remains bourgeois herself. Her imperial facade collapses when Judge Brack, outdoing Hedda in cleverness, finds out about her criminal act. Now self-​extinction is her only self-​protection. Hedda’s longing for life in its immediacy would give her credit, if she had tried to find a sensible solution in communication with others. Instead, her illusive ‘lust for life’ perverts into suicide. Her idea of heroic death as ‘unconditional beauty’28 adorning an idealized masculinity, is realized neither by her, nor by the incidental, pitiful death of Loevborg, in some way her tragical soul-​mate. And yet, from a psychological point of view, Hedda must not altogether be condemned: ‘A Human Being is only a Human Being’, as van Hove has subtitled his ‘Thoughts About Hedda Gabler’. As an artist, Ibsen depicts reality without judging. In Hedda Gabler he shows the tragical inner tension of an individual struggling against the

25 See Four Major Plays, p. 209, Hedda: ‘No responsibilities for me, thank you!’ 26 Ibid., p. 219. 27 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. by E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 51. 28 Ibsen, Four Major Plays, p. 258.

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norms and constraints of society, and at the same time being the victim of that society as much as of herself.

The Struggle for Identity ‘Particular traits and tendencies of the Hedda type are very common in modern life, and not only among women’,29 William Archer observed in 1907, implicitly suggesting the intertwinement of individuals with their historical context. Therefore Ibsen’s Hedda can be viewed under several aspects: as representing women within a particular culture and historical epoch; under the general aspect of the gender problem; and as a particular human individual coping with the pressures of conformism and outdated traditions. Arguably, Hedda’s inner and outer unbalance simultaneously reflects the characteristic antagonisms of late nineteenth-​century Europe, which in different guise persist in the twenty-​first century. At the fin de siècle two main movements, Symbolism and the Aesthetic Movement –​ each diverse in itself –​were preoccupied with cultural and social renewal. Evidently under the impression of the Darwinian Revolution, W. B. Yeats (1865–​1939) wrote about his contemporary, the British artist William Morris (1834–​1896):  ‘He imagined (…) new conditions of making and doing; and in the teeth of those scientific generalizations that cowed my boyhood, I can see some like imagining in every great change, and believe that the first flying fish first leaped, not because it sought “adaptation” to the air, but out of horror of the sea.’30 Translated into the human sphere, Yeats’s metaphor shows that necessity is the precondition to change: the necessity to escape from spiritual stagnation caused by false assumptions of reality. Yeats later wrote in ‘Estrangement’:  ‘The revolt of individualism came because the tradition had become degraded, or rather because a spurious copy had been accepted in its stead.’31 As an extreme expression 2 9 W. Archer, Introduction to Hedda Gabler, p. 7. 30 W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1980), p. 143. 31 Ibid., p. 493.

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of personal and cultural estrangement, avant-​garde movements of the early twentieth century with their roots in the final decade of the previous one mimetically imitated the mechanized world and radically dismissed tradition. Aestheticism and Symbolism, on the other hand, sought cultural renewal by selecting from the past what they deemed to be heroic, beautiful, sensuous and free  –​hence Hedda’s fantasy of Loevborg as Dionysus crowned with vine leaves. Like the flying fish that moves within two elements, both Symbolism and Aestheticism were settled between the old and the new:  they opposed stifling middle-​class standards and simultaneously dismissed the radicalism of the beginning cultural avant-​ garde. Nevertheless, their solutions were illusory, born of and bound to the irrationality of dreams rather than have an illuminating effect that would enable practical improvements. Extreme psychic conditions and ecstatic sensual experience, cherished during the fin de siècle are indeed liberating, yet not only is their effect short-​lived, but they also bear the seed of decay. Not by chance did the decadence of the belle èpoque end in the outbreak of the First World War. With Charles Baudelaire (1821–​1867), the first to openly defy conventional morality, began the development towards modernist consciousness. The aesthetes of the nineteenth century sought immediate fulfilment and freedom in the sensuality of beauty. The most popular figure of the Aesthetic Movement was Oscar Wilde (1854–​1900), who in defiance of conventionalism and morality presented himself as the personified unity of life and art. What was considered the ‘art of being oneself ’ implied the right to sin as intensified individualism. In his biography of Oscar Wilde, Richard Ellman points to the equivocalness of this conception, its being ‘disengaged from life and yet (…) deeply incriminated with it’.32 Theodor W. Adorno (1903–​1969) has defined the direct identification of life with art as ‘tautological’, since it replaces immanence by immanence, one positivity by another, and blindly identifies palpable reality with truth. Hedda, too, fails to recognize truth as the invisible, non-​violent power that reconciles the antagonisms of reality. Instead, she functionalizes beauty as both

32

Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1987), p. 311.

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weapon and shield against her despair. Beauty thus becomes a seductive distraction from truth. In the context of the transformative period of the late nineteenth century, Ibsen’s theatre had a considerable impact on contemporary artists and intellectuals like G. B. Shaw, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Sigmund Freud. The individual-​and socio-​psychological aspects of the plays also attracted the particular attention of certain members of the Frankfurt School founded in 1924. In 1936, the sociologist Leo Löwenthal (1900–​ 1993) published an essay in the School’s Journal for Social Research under the title ‘The Individual in Individualistic Society: Remarks on Ibsen’.33 There he analyses a society’s false ideals and their psychological effects on individuals and inter-​individual relations. During his exile in the United States, after the Nazis had closed the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, Löwenthal had first-​hand experience of what motivated American society. The general strife for material wealth and social prestige were central values producing conformity, hypocrisy and philistinism –​features which have accompanied all capitalist systems since the nineteenth century. Besides prominent material interests, competition, and social prestige, they define the atmosphere in Hedda Gabler.

The Dialectic of Truth, of Beauty, and the Good in Adorno’s Reading of Hedda Gabler From his dialectic point of view, Adorno, spiritus rector of the Frankfurt School, viewed Ibsen’s plays primarily under the moral aspect. Like his co-​exilant, Löwenthal, working at the American branch of the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, Adorno perceived in the character of Hedda analogies to the inner tensions and paradoxes of bourgeois society, not only in the late nineteenth century. The growing complexity of economic and social conditions reinforced capitalist structures. But while 33 Max Horkheimer, ‘Das Individuum in der individualistischen Gesellschaft:  Bemerkungen über Ibsen’, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 5/​3 (1936), 321–​365.

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they aroused opposition in the form of political and social revolutions, the actual gender problem remained generally unattended and unsolved. This prompted Adorno, still in American exile, to reflect on ‘The Truth about Hedda Gabler’. ‘The feminine character is a negative imprint of domination. But therefore equally bad,’34 he observes in 1945 in his Minima Moralia.35 The lasting tensions, in a contingent world, between individual and society require persistent critical distinctions between the true and the false, distinctions which, due to their inherent ambivalence, can never be final in ordinary life. ‘Wrong life cannot be lived rightly’,36 is one of Adorno’s key theses. Truth in Adorno’s concise piece on Hedda Gabler is as ambivalent as Ibsen’s protagonist herself. But so are more or less the other characters in the play: With different accentuation, each one is right in his or her wrongness, or wrong in rightness. By the same dialectics, beauty can be both blinding and illuminating. Without explicitly referring to Hedda’s obsession with it, Adorno defines the worship of beauty in the nineteenth century as an ‘uprising (…) against bourgeois good’, which as ‘goodness’ was ‘a deformation of good’.37 Rather than enacting a universally valid moral principle, bourgeois goodness is subjective and conditional. Influenced by Kant’s (1724–​1804) moral philosophy, Adorno states that ‘(b)y severing the moral principle from the social and displacing it into the realm of private conscience, … (i)t dispenses with the realization of a condition worthy of men that is implicit in the principle of morality.’ The good links the subject with its non-​identical other; its presupposes an individual’s sense of responsibility and freedom  –​the freedom to judge, to change, and also to say ‘no’. Goodness, on the other hand, is an inveterate yes-​sayer. ‘Each of its 3 4 Ibid., p. 95. 35 Adorno, Minima Moralia, pp. 93–​95. 36 Adorno, ibid., p. 39 (‘Es gibt kein wahres Leben im falschen’, MM [Frankfurt/​ M.: Suhrkamp, 1969], p. 42). 37 Ibid., p. 94. All quotations that follow are on this page. In ‘Dramatis Personae’ W. B. Yeats, too, distinguishes between good and goodness when making critical remarks on George Moore and Moore’s opinion of his own novel Esther Waters: ‘(I) t radiates goodness.’ Yeats writes: ‘He wanted to be good as the mass of men understand goodness’ (Yeats, Autobiographies, p. 406).

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actions has inscribed in it a certain resignation and solace: it aims at alleviation, not cure’, as Adorno claims. Basking in ‘the ephemeral image of harmony’, goodness ‘only emphasizes more cruelly the pain of irreconcilability that it foolishly denies.’ In that it ‘ignores the distance that is the individual’s only protection against the infringement of the general’, it is an ‘offence against taste and consideration.’ In the sensitive individual such subtle violence may evoke an attitude of aggression in self-​defence as antidote against offensive repression. On the other hand, philistine coerciveness may be answered by the silent escape into a dream world and myths. What Adorno in his reflections on Hedda Gabler calls the ‘impotent utopia of beauty’ has the equivocality of being both true and deceptive. According to Adornian aesthetics, true beauty, existing in itself and for itself, radiates self-​identity and freedom –​the thing-​in-​itself, unity of graspable materiality and immaterial possibility. Under the shock of the Holocaust, Adorno radically sees in goodness a source of evil: ‘The creed of evil has been, since the beginnings of highly industrialized society, not only a precursor of barbarism, but a mask of good.’ With fixed identifications being alien to negative dialectics, Adorno does not see in Aunt Juliana an incarnation of goodness, but rather the contrary to Hedda’s egocentricity and cruelty. Utterly selfless and kind, Juliana practices the good, while bound to tradition and convention her actions often corrupt the good into goodness that evokes Hedda’s contempt and resistance. ‘Mortally offending the utterly well-​meaning Aunt Julle, she sins against what is best in her own life, because she sees the best as a desecration of the good’, as Adorno describes the ambiguity of values and interpersonal relations. In the play, Hedda’s deliberate slur against Juliana’s hat is one example of the confusion of goodness with the good, and with that, the confusion of what is right and what is wrong. Hedda ‘sadistically vents her hatred (…) on the defenceless victim’, Adorno writes, seeing the actual reason of Hedda’s hatred in her ‘obnoxious marriage’, the result of her submission to and simultaneous rejection of conventionalism. The spinster aunt reduces Hedda’s complex personality to the image of the beautiful, obedient wife of Jörgen, her darling nephew. According to Adorno, ‘Hedda is the victim and not Julle.’ In that she ‘baulks at anything general’, Hedda justly opposes anything predefined and abstract. However, she is wrong

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in her exclusiveness and absolutizations, culminating in her fixed idea of beauty, her shield against commonness, but also against all otherness. Adorno’s thesis: ‘(i)n beauty, opaque particularity asserts itself as the norm, as alone general, normal generality having become too transparent. (…) So beauty finds itself in the wrong, while yet being right against it.’38 Hedda has fallen prey to ‘the delusion of the tragic hero’.39 Her critical intelligence makes her extremely sensitive to negativities, including her own, which she tries to combat by a facade of absoluteness. While Aunt Juliana is wrong in believing in ‘good’ generality, Hedda justly resents ‘the untruth of bad generality’. It shows, in Adorno’s words, ‘the equality of everything unfree’. According to ‘determinate negation’ –​the central idea of dialectics since Hegel (1770–​1831) –​that everything simultaneously implies its opposite, the same dialectics that characterizes beauty, also defines morality. Contrary to the ruling opinion that beauty and immorality are antagonisms, Adorno claims their mutual relationship. Hence, the question ‘is Hedda immoral?’ must be equivocally answered with ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Adorno sees Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler as the subtle illustration that morality can be immoral, just as immorality can be moral: ‘(I)n rejecting what is immoral in morality, repression, it inherits morality’s deepest concern: that with all limitations all violence too should be abolished.’40

Brian Friel’s ‘Version’ of Hedda Gabler On 10 September 2007, having completed what he defined as a ‘Version’ of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, Brian Friel thanked Michael Colgan, the then artistic director of Dublin’s Gate Theatre, for ‘urging me to do this job’ and he continued with characteristic self-​deprecation:  ‘Without that nudging –​confidence –​belief –​kindness I might well be mute and on

38 39 40

Ibid. Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 95. Ibid.

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the dole-​queue.’41 The result is proof that even at the age of seventy-​eight, Friel’s creative energy and skill had not abandoned him. As it had been the case with Performances (2003), the motivation for the play had come from without, but the authenticity of Friel’s Hedda was unquestioned: the play was received with enthusiasm and admiration. Among other theatre experts, Dina Wood from Faber & Faber called it ‘a powerful, beautiful, endlessly quotable and heartrending Hedda Gabler’.42 And in his critique in the Irish Times of 13 September 2008, Fintan O’Toole declared that Friel’s ‘Version’ is ‘a bold reimagining of the classic Ibsen play. (…) Across the gulf of the 20th century one great playwright is talking to another (sic) and imagining with breathtaking chutzpah what he would have done if he were Ibsen.’43 It was not meant as Friel’s critique of Ibsen but, as O’Toole goes on to explain, ‘since we cannot really experience Hedda as Ibsen wrote it, he allows us to experience it as if it was written by a great English-​language playwright.’ But what, apart from his need to stay creative, had induced Friel to give in to Colgan’s ‘nudging’? Friel’s profound dislike of Hedda’s character had been the prime reason why he first he had declined Colgan’s suggestion. ‘I have spent the past five days with Hedda Gabler and I’m afraid we have reluctantly agreed to split. I was never crazy about her. But after reading her five times (…) I finally decided I don’t want to have anything more to do with her’,44 he wrote to Colgan on 24 April 2007. And still half a year later, well advanced into his work, he affirmed with dry humour: ‘I’d be terrified to spend a week with her in Ibiza.’45 As unsympathetic as Hedda seemed to him, Friel after all did develop an interest in her, with the intention to explore her psychological ‘make-​up’, to understand her ‘undertow of malice’, her ‘obsessions’, her ‘passions … perverted by fear and the dread of scandal.’46 Friel’s Hedda does not pertain to a particular historical epoch,

41 42 43 44 45 46

MS 49/​263,2. MS 49/​263,1. MS 49/​263,4. MS 49/​263,1. MS 49/​263,2. MS 49/​263,1.

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nor is it a ‘Hibernized Ibsen’.47 By his masterly use of the inseparability between language and psyche, he depicts the general problematic of humans in modernity perhaps even more emphatically than Ibsen. His ‘version’ is a dramatic work in its own right; it sets new accents and heightens the dramatic effect of Ibsen’s play without changing its tenor. As Michael Billington has put it in The Guardian, Friel ‘spell(s) out things Ibsen left implicit.’48 Thus Friel’s ‘version’ is more than a translation, which in George Steiner’s words is ‘an act of reciprocity in order to restore balance’,49 however, like translation, Friel’s interpretation relies on the ‘hermeneutic motion’. ‘Like all modes of focused understanding (it) will detail, illume, and generally body forth its object.’50 The Hedda Gabler of 2008 is a Frielian Ibsen rather than an Ibsenized Friel. Before Friel formed his own conception of the play, he had studied various English translations of Ibsen’s original.51 According to his publisher, Peter Fallon, the new interpretation and its theatrical presentation showed ‘Friel hallmarks everywhere –​the (American) usages, the step-​by-​step speeches towards more accurate statement and understanding.’52 The language in Friel’s Hedda is not primarily meant to modernize Ibsen’s naturalistic style, but to highlight the characters in their full individuality, and to render them even more vividly alive with regard to postmodern audiences. To the dramatic dialogues Friel occasionally adds longer individual speeches, in which the characters deliberately, or unintendedly reveal their thoughts, memories and motivations –​reminding of Friel’s theatrical technique in Faith Healer (1979) and Molly Sweeney (1994). The interdependence of language, gesture and meaning –​Friel frequently replaces Ibsen’s words by telling gestures –​along with the interrelatedness of the characters suspends the emotional distance between audience and characters and underlines what words alone cannot express. Also, Friel’s ‘version’ of Hedda contains 7 See Fintan O’Toole, MS 49/​263,4. 4 48 Michael Billington, ‘Hedda Gabler: Friel’s Adaptation’, The Guardian (13 Septem-​ ber 2012). 49 George Steiner, After Babel (Oxford/​New York: OUP, 1992), p. 316. 50 Ibid. 51 See MS 49/​263,1. 52 Ibid.

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some of his staple themes: Firstly, the Chekhovian network of interpersonal relationships and, secondly, the characters’ inherent ambivalence, in particular that of the protagonist who both defines and is defined by a male world. Inseparable from this is, thirdly, Friel’s motif of the dialectic of private and public, the individual as subject and object. Finally, reminiscent of Faith Healer and Give Me Your Answer, Do Friel exemplifies in the writer Eilert Loevborg the precarious situation and function of the modern artist in a world that is increasingly experienced as vulnerable and uncertain. While in Ibsen’s play Loevborg’s manuscript ‘is about the social forces’ and ‘the future course of civilization’,53 the title in Friel’s version projects a direct and precise reflection on the relation between society and the art, suggestive of the problematics of Friel’s own aesthetics. ‘The first part’, as he has Loevborg explain, ‘analyses the role and the power of the arts in our society today. (…) And the second part, the core of the book, looks at the way this society will develop under these artistic pressures.’54 Friel’s Hedda Gabler is a further impressive example of his ‘Theatre of Hope and Despair –​unfortunately, it was to be his last one. ‘Man is always hopeful of, always pushing towards better things; and to bring this about, change must be made in the actual way of life’:55 Sean O’Casey’s statement in ‘The Power of Laughter’ is compatible with a ‘new beginning’, a frequent challenge in Friel’s plays. It also applies to the indefinite and therefore hopeful ending in Friel’s as well as in Ibsen’s Hedda. Thea’s and George’s/​Jörgen’s chance of a new beginning counters Hedda’s irrevocable suicide. As in Ibsen, spiritual freedom and imprisonment, longing and refusal, chance and finality, life and death are overlapping in Friel’s play. Yet Friel accentuates hope by means of language, not to reduce despair as such, but to renounce it as an absolute. His version has a tone of almost Wildean lightness; his Hedda, though apparently more perfidious than her Ibsenite model, shows sardonic humour which again mitigates her unsympathetic demeanour. If we smile at Hedda’s wit, or laugh about George Tesman’s enthusiastic outbreaks that show him somewhat beyond 53 54 55

Ibsen, Four Major Plays, p. 212. Friel, Plays 3, p. 638. Sean O’Casey, The Green Crow (New York: George Braziller, 1956), p. 226.

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his wits in a style similar to Casimir in Friel’s Aristocrats (1979), or Frank in Molly Sweeney (1994), we are at the same time conscious of their painful deficits which lies hidden behind their exuberant demeanour. Friel unmistakeably suggests that Hedda’s disrespectfulness and sadistic impulses are her reaction not only to those whom she hopelessly envies, but also to a coercive and at the same time hypocritical society, from which she feels unable to free herself. Experiencing Aunt Juliana’s well-​meaning eagerness as intrusive and humiliating, Hedda vents her rage only with a secret curse: ‘Interfering bitch’.56 When the spinster aunt declares that she needs someone to live for,57 unsatisfied longing reveals itself as the backside of her undoubted altruism. Her latent wish for self-​fulfilment renders her not entirely innocent of her orphaned nephew’s narcissism and psychotic reactions. As a staunch traditionalist, Juliana expects pregnancy to be the natural result of Hedda’s and George’s months-​long honeymoon. Consequently, she does not stop treating Hedda as an expectant mother. Absolutely rejecting motherhood, Hedda’s inner rage at being thus personally diminished can only turn into sarcasm, especially when the aunt, in her unconscious misogynic attitude, submits Hedda entirely to her husband: ‘God bless you and keep you, Hedda Tesman. For George’s sake!’58 The issue of Hedda’s pregnancy remains an open question in both Ibsen and Friel. Ivo van Hove resolves it unequivocally with his conclusion that ‘Hedda kills her unborn child when she kills herself ’.59 Friel, however, although he, too, remains ambiguous about the matter, adumbrates a possibility which would be consistent with Hedda’s fears on the one hand, and her cunning manipulations on the other. Hedda’s explicit rejection of responsibility in life may not be a sufficient reason against her pregnancy. The argument that both her own and her husband’s disinterest in performing the conjugal act might not be unrealistic. Regarding George’s exclusive interest in books, his academic career, and his excessive ties to his aunts –​sources of his wife’s frustration –​may even suggest his impotence. Analogously, Hedda’s former relation with Loevborg had shown her 5 6 57 58 59

Ibid., p. 631. See: Friel, Plays 3, p. 683. Ibid., p. 600. Van Hove, From Shakespeare to Bowie, p. 41.

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aversion against sexuality as an expression of her general fear of real life. Her pregnancy would mean recreation and renewal, a new beginning in reality, openness to the unknown rather than irrational fantasy –​qualities alien to Hedda, but inert in George, whose enthusiasm after all enables him to optimistically face the world. With deep psychological empathy Friel creates a most dynamic scene in the final act, showing the mutuality between Hedda’s craftiness and Geoge’s foolishness. With her habit of making people step into the trap of their own myths and assumptions, Hedda tries to make her husband believe that she is with child, without explicitly saying so. She obviously intends to test again George’s credulity, after she had successfully saved her from public scandal and legal prosecution through by shamelessly lying to her husband: ‘I did it for you, George. Believe me. For my husband.’60 Sensing the absurdity of her assertion that she burnt the manuscript of George’s rival out marital, she presents pregnancy as her last straw that is to save her from impending social annihilation. ‘And now to fill your cup to overflowing. In four months’ time –​all being well, as the quaint expression has it –​all being well I’m going to have a –​No, no, no, no, no. Tell you what –​I’ll get prescient Auntie Juju to spell it out for you. She has known almost as long as I have.’61 As before, when George at first condemned Hedda’s ‘criminal’ and ‘immoral’, before he let himself be overpowered by ecstatic joy, his first reaction is disbelief: ‘Wishful thinking. Trust me … Be sensible, darling –​ just not true.’ But then again his childish narcissism gains the upper hand over his rationality. His wild ‘buffoonery’ shows him almost demented; as Hedda wished, his cup is indeed overflowing with pride and joy. Yet instead of feeling relief, Hedda rigidifies at her husband’s reaction, she sits upright, her eyes closed, ‘her face a mask’:62 she realizes that as, arguably, she has lied again, she will be lost., after all. The horror that is now taking hold of her may be caused less by her husband’s silly reaction to the prospect of new life, than by Hedda’s certainty of her inevitable death. ‘Oh God … dear God … oh dear God … ’63 are her only words she can murmur in despair. Her idea 0 6 61 62 63

Ibid., p. 685. Friel, Plays 3, p. 686. Ibid., p. 687. Ibid., p. 688.

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of suicide turns into fact, when her crime has actually been discovered by Judge Brack, her suitor, but also her equal in taste, shrewdness, and egocentricity. Hedda now stands spiritually naked before the man who always hoped to observe her naked body through an imagined crack in the door. Shooting herself is her only option to escape the dilemma of being in the power of the Judge on the one hand, and of becoming a social outcast on the other. Resulting from utter hopelessness her suicide is in sharp contrast to the suicide she wanted her idol Loevborg to commit as a heroic act of freedom and self-​realization. His death is ridiculous and incidental, while hers is a tragic necessity, but nevertheless a triumph: the triumph of a victim that has retained control over herself. Neither Loevborg’s nor Hedda’s death was a culmination of beauty. ‘There is blood everywhere’,64 as Friel prosaically advises in his stage direction. Unlike Ibsen he lends the maid Bertha the distinct voice of a critical observer who is at once detached and involved; it both reveals and conceals the artist’s own position. In the midst of the general commotion about Hedda’s horrifying death, Bertha’s words, disapproving, yet conciliatory, are: ‘May God in His mercy overlook all her human faults.’65

Conclusion While Friel’s and Adorno’s views of Hedda Gabler are similar with regard to their humanism and dialectic stance, a juxtaposition of the work of dramatic art and Adorno’s sociocultural and moral reflections must of course acknowledge their difference as to motivation and method. Since Friel has not changed the tenor of Ibsen’s original, the fact that Adorno wrote his text more than sixty years prior to Friel’s version of Hedda Gabler should be irrelevant. The problem of a juxtaposition is given by the fact that Adorno, rather than dealing with the play as a work of dramatic literature, perceived in it fundamental aspects that corroborate 4 Ibid., p. 703. 6 65 Ibid., p. 704.

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his cultural analyses and theses. He interrogates each constituent of the traditional triad ‘Truth, Beauty and the Good’ and integrates them into the conditionality of the world rather than accepting them as monolithic and absolute. Individually and as a triad these fundamental human values are submitted to the critical reflection of both individual and society. As life means change, they must be incessantly recreated according to their social relevance. Truth, beauty and good remain the same in that in a changing world they are persistently sought and re-​established –​a process which includes truth and untruth, success and error, and which excludes the final separation of one thing from the other. The separation of beauty from the good would be both sign and cause of moral and social decline. The inherent dialectic of each concept as both immateriality and materiality requires the persistent re-​thinking of their mutual relationship, which is never final, nor is it exempt from human error. Human truth lies in the acknowledgement of this ambiguity; conciliatoriness is its only truthful consequence. ‘Indeed there must be no verdicts. Because being alive is the postponement of verdicts, isn’t it? Because verdicts are provided only when it’s all over, all concluded’:66 The idea of Daisy’s liberated speech in Friel’s Gove Me Your Answer, Do underlies his version of Hedda Gabler. It also shows the essence of Adorno’s negative dialectics. Friel accordingly puts particular emphasis on the ambivalence of all characters in the play. Thea, ‘addicted to her anxieties’,67 proves fearless and courageous; Aunt Juliana believes in the good but unintentionally and naively causes harm through goodness; George, fixed on tradition, reveals his ability to open himself to the future; Loevborg, at the crossroads of intellectualism and sensualism and wavering between victory and defeat. Very similar to Hedda, he is as strong as he is weak. Judge Brack, by profession representing the law, is a seducer and blackmailer, a ‘smooth scoundrel’,68 as Hedda, his peer in cleverness, remarks. She has to deal with all of these characters; yet while each in his or her way is seeking personal fulfilment through others, Hedda’s exclusivity renders her as unable Brian Friel, Give Me Your Answer, Do (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: Gallery Press, 1997), pp.  79–​80. 67 Ibid., p. 635. 8 Ibid., p. 628. 6 66

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to adequately cope with their human faults, as she is unable to cope with her own. Her radicality mixes with her bourgeois fears, which makes it destructive rather than constructive. Hedda represents the opposite of Adorno’s thesis that in the nineteenth century ‘(t)he new position radical bourgeois thought took up to parry the thrusts against it went further (…) than merely replacing ideological illusion by a truth proclaimed in a fury of self-​destruction, defiant protest, and capitulation.’69 Protest then was a new evaluation of beauty, linking beauty with immorality, and the dialectic of immorality with the good. In Friel’s as in Ibsen’s drama, Hedda fails to recognize the complexity of the interrelation between and the ambivalence of art, society and morality –​how could she? Rather, she was ‘following an erratic course’,70 as Brack justly put it, yet unjustly considering his selfish intentions. And although Hedda’s course was erratic, her drawn consequence, self-​destruction as a mixture of defiant protest and capitulation, make her indeed a tragic heroine. ***

69 70

Adorno, Minima Moralia, pp. 93–​94. Friel, Plays 3, p. 670.

Chapter 5

Brian Friel and Francis Bacon: Artistic Creation and Faith Healing Viewed in the Light of Negative Dialectics

‘The Burden of the Incommunicable’ In the ‘Theatre of Hope and Despair’,1 originally a lecture given in Chicago in 1967, Brian Friel makes a basic distinction between the theatre and the other genres of art –​literature, music, and the visual arts: ‘The dramatist’s technique is the technique of the preacher and the politician’, their function is ‘through the group, not the personal conversation.’2 By this technique, those who are addressing an audience must ‘get the attention of the collective mind, hold it, persuade it, mesmerize it’. In a special sense, dramatists, have ‘lost everything’, if they fail to forge their audience into a community. For unlike the concrete purpose of a political speech or a religious sermon, the influence of all true artists is mediated through their work alone, free from tendentiousness, or even the slightest trace of direct influence. ‘Artworks exercise a practical effect, if they do so at all, not by haranguing, but by the scarcely apprehensible transformation of consciousness’:3 Theodor W. Adorno’s claim in Aesthetic Theory applies 1 2 3

Christopher Murray, ed., Brian Friel:  Essays, Diaries, Interviews  –​1969–​1999 (London/​New York: Faber & Faber, 1999), pp. 15–​24. Ibid., p. 18. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. by Robert Hollot-​Kentor (London:  The Athlone Press, 1999), p. 243.

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to all artistic genres. ‘(E)ncapsuled’4 in the work of art itself, its ‘truth content’ is to be deciphered by the individual recipient. ‘Dramatists have no solutions’,5 Friel warns. Nevertheless, the aim to bring across a certain truth that might change consciousness, poses a special challenge to the playwright. The artist carries ‘(t)he burden of the incommunicable’,6 as Friel has called the creative process. It is a hazardous enterprise, because of its inability to represent its object unequivocally. Accordingly, the reception of the work of art is unpredictable and often controversial. Exploring the invisible truth behind immediate reality makes artworks as unfathomable and enigmatic, as the creative process itself exceeds mere rational construction.

The Artist: A Healer in Need to Be Healed? –​Artistic Self-​ cognition and Authorial Self-​irony In his ‘Sporadic Diaries’, Friel tells of a play’s ‘false starts’7 and of its staggering progress, which make him sway between modest hope and total despair.8 As a true artist, he reveals himself not as the master, but as the servant of his gift that is burden and relief in one. Its presence cannot be ordered, it is longed for and simultaneously unexpected. The truth which it reveals it conceals at the same time, and yet, it grants moments of metaphysical experience, which illuminate and elate the receptive mind. ‘The wind bloweth where it listeth’,9 to quote the biblical trope. This paradox of fortifying uncertainty makes the artist a ‘diviner’ in the broadest religious 4 5 6 7 8 9

Ibid., p. 247. Murray, 1999, p. 24. Ibid., p. 68. Ibid., p. 64. Ibid., p. 67. St. John, 3, 8:  ‘The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound whereof and canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth: so is everyone that is born of the spirit.’

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sense: a mediator between the numinous and the profane or, according to Adornian epistemology, between the physical object and its metaphysical ‘more’. After the stage productions of nine of Friel’s plays,10 the playwright’s self-​critical attitude impelled him to write a self-​reflective play focused not simply on the artist’s precarious position between self and society, but on his/​her self-​image between self-​doubts and elation. Already in 1964, in his groundbreaking play, Philadelphia, Here I Come, Friel had tackled the problem of the relation between private and public; he now transferred the issue onto the complex role and inner situation of the artist, whom he associated with a healer, or priest, a theme which he later took up in Molly Sweeney (1994). Early in 1975, after some short preliminary and unpublished pieces,11 Friel began to work on the play later titled Faith Healer. Though still the underlying theme, the artist’s role in society is subjected to introspection. But the balanced tension between outside and inside, between subjectivity and objectivity, hardly ever happening in ordinary life, becomes ambiguous reality as memory. The central figure of Friel’s play, the itinerant faith healer Frank Hardy, clearly shows parallels to the Gaelic writer of a split nation, who therefore is himself split between suffering and wholeness, uncertainty and self-​ assurance. It is the inner tension of all artists concerned with truth, the tension between the deep-​seated desire to heal both the personal and collective split and the consciousness of possible failure. The vulnerable triad of artist, creative process, and the work is indeed analogous to the precarious act of faith healing, which is only successful, if by some magical power the artist-​healer momentarily feels identical with the patient. Exemplified in Frank Hardy, this extraordinary, though chancy gift places the artist beyond the bourgeois norms and conventions without alienating him from his social, cultural and historical context. By his/​her particular sensibility towards finite and delusive reality, an artist feels impelled to ‘heal’, not by ‘preaching’, but by the dialectic method of showing how things are and 10 11

Philadelphia, Here I Come (1965), The Loves of Cass Mcguire (1967), Crystal and Fox (1969), The Mundy Scheme (1970), Gentle Island (1973), The Freedom of the City (1974), The Enemy Within (1975), Volunteers (1979), Aristocrats (1980). Friel Papers, MS 37,075/​8–​9.

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suggesting how they might be. In the work of art, in turn, intellect and sensuality are mutually reconciled; in the shock of cognition their cooperation may induce in recipients lies the possibility of practical change. Faith Healer had its première on New York’s Broadway in 1979. The play is simultaneously introspective and retrospective, fittingly consisting of the dramatically monologized memories of its three characters. Its reception on the Broadway Theatre did not match its complexity and depth. After a choice of possible titles for his ‘montage-​play in which (…) a dozen or more disparate themes are woven’,12 Friel had finally focused on the mystical and doubtful occupation of an artist-​healer. The title of Faith Healer13 indicates the ambiguity of both the leading character and the entire play, a masterpiece in which everything is related with everything, with all particulars constituting a magical whole. Friel treats this surreal presentation of the problematics of an artist both with existential concern and subtle self-​irony. Frank Hardy’s memories of his life as a faith healer tell of one who is tormented by doubts and self-​questionings: ‘Am I a con man?’,14 ‘(w) as it all chance –​or skill? –​or illusion? –​or delusion? Precisely what power did I possess? Could I summon it? When and how?’15 In the rare cases of Hardy’s successful faith healing, these questions which ‘undermined’ his life, had become meaningless and made him ‘for a few hours (…) perfect’ in himself.16 Hardy’s self-​healing depends on his healing others –​or was his healing of others nothing but the means to a selfish end? This, however, would reduce him to ‘an emotionally abusive narcissist’,17 which by virtue of his strange gift he cannot be. Not even from the point of view of Grace’s retrospective account of her complex and complicated relation The Seventh Son, Salmon, The End of the Tour, Last Chance, Chance, see:  Friel Papers, Manuscripts 37,75/​1. 13 An interesting explanation of Friel’s use of this title as an occupation rather than specifically related to the character of Frank Hardy is given by Christopher Murray in his The Theatre of Brian Friel: Tradition and Modernity (London/​New Delhi/​ New York/​Sidney: Bloomsbury, 2014), pp. 82–​83. 14 The italics mark it as a quotation! (S.b., with reference to Bacon). 15 Brian Friel, Plays 1 (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), p. 333. 16 Ibid. 17 Zosia Kukzynska, ‘Brian Friel, Francis Bacon, and Faith Healer’, Irish University Review 50/​2 (Autumn/​Winter 2020), 329.

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to her husband is such a verdict justifiable. Also in art, ‘there must be no verdicts’,18 as Friel has Daisy say in his later play, Give Me Your Answer, Do (1997). The monologues of Grace and Hardy’s manager, Teddy, give proof of the intricate relationship between the three characters. In different ways, the faith healer’s inner disruption affects his two companions emotionally and practically, while in reality he would be lost without the assistance by his wife and manager. Naturally, their interrelation cannot be without conflict: ‘Wrong life cannot be lived rightly’,19 as Adorno famously has characterized human existence. Teddy, once an entertainer in cheap showbiz, shows understanding for Hardy’s eccentricity when in retrospect he says: ‘(B)ut maybe being the kind of man he was, you know, with that strange gift he had, I’ve thought maybe –​well, maybe he had to have his own way of facing things.’20 Grace, on the other hand, is split between her love for Frank Hardy, the man, and her lack of understanding for him as faith healer. This in turn rouses Frank’s contempt for Grace’s bourgeois conformism, of which on the other hand, he profits, finding her ‘controlled, correct, methodical, orderly, who fed me, washed and ironed for me, nursed me, humoured me. Saved me, I’m sure, from drinking myself to death’, And yet, depending on chance and the occasional moments of total freedom, he feels smothered by what he calls her ‘mulish, unquestioning, indefatigable loyalty that settled on us like dust.’21 Friel himself admits in interview that ‘how honourable or dishonourable’ the craft of writing can be, it must (…) of necessity lead (the writer) to great selfishness.’22

18 19 2 0 21 22

Brian Friel, Give Me Your Answer, Do (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 1997), p. 79. Adorno, Minima Miralia, trans. by E. F. N. Jephcott (London/​New York: Verso, 2002), p. 39. Plays 1, p. 365. Ibid., p. 335. Friel, ‘Interview with Fintan O’Toole’, in Murray, Brian Friel, Interviews, p. 111.

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The Arcane Space of Liberation Not until the faith healer’s conclusive monologue does it become clear that all three characters are speaking from that extraterrestrial dimension commonly called death.23 For all three characters –​for Grace who is talking to herself, for Teddy, with his selflessness (the dialectic counterpart to Hardy’s self-​sacrifice) and his talent for entertainment still addressing an audience, and for the artist-​healer Frank, still confiding himself to the public –​the present is an illuminated past. Yet of all three it is the faith healer alone, whose critical self-​reflections have enabled him to change, and therefore transcend the mere recording of the past by his two companions. Hardy’s search for truth and his ultimate cognition –​about himself in the first place –​have led him back to his origins, a metaphorical homecoming after his erratic life in search for wholeness. Such enlightened homecoming defeats death as ultimate finality. In different contexts this idea of a homecoming permeates Friel’s entire work, inspired by T. S. Eliot (1888–​1965) whose poem ‘Little Gidding’ contains the lines: ‘And the end of all our exploring /​Will be to arrive where we started /​And know the place for the first time.’24 This in turn recalls the myth of the ancient hero’s perilous journey through the labyrinth, to its mystical centre, the interior of things, and his return to the beginning, transformed and redeemed. Frank Hardy’s career as a faith healer had started with a lie, his proud self-​presentation as the mysterious ‘Francis Hardy, Seventh Son of a Seventh Son’. It then was replaced by the ‘modest’, slightly ironic ‘The Fantastic Francis Hardy, Faith Healer’, finally to be reduced to the accidental and almost self-​effacing ‘FH –​Faith Healer’: ‘Perhaps if my name had been According to Christopher Murray’s reading, Teddy is still alive (see: Murray, The Theatre of Brian Friel, p. 81), whereas I can perceive in the play three different modes of death, according to the three different characters: Hardy’s self-​sacrifice; Grace’s suicide; Teddy’s natural decease. Yet a Teddy still alive could represent a link between past and present and add an element of realism to the metaphoric character of the play. 24 T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (London: Faber & Faber, 1995), p. 43. 23

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Charles Potter I would have been … Cardinal Primate.’25 In his last monologue, however, uttered from what Adorno envisioned as ‘the standpoint of redemption’ and knowledge,26 Frank Hardy has come home to himself. In true self-​identity his name and character coincide; in contradiction to common logic, his courageous self-​denial has rendered him free. His final words, ‘At long last I was renouncing chance’,27 marks the ultimate liberation, in Eliot’s words, the ‘death of hope and despair’.28 It may be interpreted as the artist’s aesthetic experience of ‘realized utopia’, the ethereal experience of personal fulfilment during the creative process. ‘(y)ou are the music/​while the music lasts’,29 as T. S. Eliot has put it. The writer and literary scholar, Seamus Deane (1940–​2021) accordingly claims that ‘Friel is occupied with the nature, not the function, of the gift.’30 Indeed it is not art’s function to cure, but if an artist lacks this metaphysical experience of wholeness, he or she is unable to oppose the paralysing status quo. In his preliminary notes to Faith Healer, Friel therefore rejects the idea of giving up chance. He himself answers his question, whether Hardy’s ‘final going out’ is ‘his renunciation of chance –​and therefore his artistic death’, with a ‘NO’ in capital letters and red ink: It is ‘(n)ot exclusively artistic –​the renunciation of chance is everyone’s death.’31 In other words, chance means life, the chance to change in the sense of Adorno’s central thesis: ‘What is must be changeable if it is not to be all.’32 Chance means the possibility of renewal, which is the vital energy of life. Thus artists are healers, indeed. 25 Friel, Plays 1, pp. 332–​333. 26 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia:  Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. by E. F. N. Jephcott (London:  Verso, 2002), p. 247. ‘Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption:  all else is construction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with the rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.’ 27 Friel, Plays 1, p. 376. 28 T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, p. 37. 29 Ibid., p. 30. 30 Seamus Deane, ‘The Name of the Game’, in Alan J. Peacock, ed., The Achievement of Brian Friel, Ulster Editions & Monographs, 4 (Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1992), p. 111. 31 The Brian Friel Papers, MS 37,075/​2. 32 Friel, Plays 1, p. 373.

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‘The Chance of Reading Bacon’ The 1970s marked Friel’s most productive decade. In 1975 he was particularly influenced by two new publications. One was After Babel by the literary scholar and language philosopher George Steiner (1929–​2020), whose discourse on the equivocality and multifacetiousness of language both confirmed and deepened Friel’s own views on that subject and is known to have provided the linguistic basis for Translations (1980). The other publication was Interviews with Francis Bacon, a collection of talks between the Dublin-​born British painter Francis Bacon (1909–​1992), and the art critic David Sylvester (1924–​2001), the first to discover Bacon’s genius. For Friel this was again the right reading at the right time: ‘The chance of reading Bacon at this time’, he appreciatively marked in his notes for his new play. It was to become, as Friel explained years later, a ‘metaphor for the art, the craft of writing (…) (a)nd the great confusion we all have about it, those of us who are involved in it.’33 The central importance of chance in Bacon’s painting process struck a chord in Friel, who was all too familiar with an artist’s dilemma in the tension field between success and failure. The fact that the faith healer Frank Hardy’s inability to live with indecision34 is in sharp contrast with Francis Bacon, to whom chance was the essential element in his painting process, suggests Friel’s own interrogation, at the time, about the role of chance in artistic creation. For Bacon, ‘a creature of integrity in whom the work and the life are one’, as the Irish poet, Paul Durcan (1944–​)35 states, liberating himself by renouncing chance would indeed have meant the end of his life. ‘He was so accustomed to be carried along by chance’,36 Diana Watson, Bacon’s cousin and confidante, asserts. Mystery governed his life in society, in painting and at the roulette table. The unpredictability and indomitableness of chance stimulated his senses and made his life exciting, 3 3 Friel, ‘In Interview with Fintan O’Toole’, in Murray, Brian Friel, 1999, p. 111. 34 Friel papers, MS 37,075/​1, October 1975. 35 Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, Francis Bacon REVELATIONS (London:  William Collins, 2021), p. 689. 36 Ibid., p. 124.

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a life defined by the dialectic of win and loss, success and failure, joy and pain. Bacon experienced ambivalence even in chance itself, as its unexpectedness and uncontrollability revealed to him inevitable truth:  ‘the (roulette) wheel can do nothing wrong.’37 While for Friel’s faith healer the dependence on chance has become unbearable, an analogy emerges between Bacon’s innate psychic tenseness released in painting, and Frank Hardy’s hazardous healing power: ‘I feel I want to win, but then I feel the same in painting. I feel I want to win even if I always lose’,38 says the painter and gambler; ‘nine times out of ten nothing happened’,39 says the faith healer. And yet, both are driven by their unquenchable thirst for completion and happiness –​if not as an unchangeable absolute, at least in the epiphanic moments offered to them by chance. Friel, too, felt the fundamental power of chance in artistic work. He was especially impressed by Bacon’s statement that ‘(i)n allowing chance to work, one allows the deeper levels of personality to come across’.40 This does not only include radical self-​discovery –​Bacon, for instance, ‘read Freud with great fascination’,41 it also increases an artist’s special sensitivity for the unfathomable truth of others. Despite their diametrically opposite lifestyles and their different media, both artists pursue the same aim: Friel ‘explore(s) the dark and private corners of individual souls’,42 while it is Bacon’s endeavour to ‘trap’ human truth in his paintings. In each case, the transformation into art is in itself a hazardous enterprise. The concept of ‘chance’ is in itself ambiguous. Roget’s Thesaurus offers nine different definitions, all of which expressing uncertainty, a sense that increasingly characterizes the modern Zeitgeist. The profound changes brought about by industrialization have shattered traditional orders and beliefs. Especially after two world wars and the social and cultural disintegrations that followed, the consciousness of life’s insecurity and chanciness 37 38 39 40 41 42

David Sylvester, Interviews, p. 116. Ibid., p. 54. Friel, Plays 1, p. 334. Brian Friel, MS 37, 075/​1. Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon: Studies for a Portrait (London: Thames & Hudson, 2021), p. 36. Murray, Brian Friel, p. 77.

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prevails, though not without activating existent counterforces which have analysed and explained human aberrations. As the German philosopher and founder of Critical Theory, Max Horkheimer (1895–​1973), and his colleague and friend Adorno demonstrate in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), ‘enlightened’ humanity has revealed its dark sides which led to the horrors of the Holocaust and could even end in self-​extinction. The Freudian Revolution during the transition of the nineteenth to the twentieth century showed that human behaviour is steered by the unconscious more than consciousness likes to admit. Freud’s influence has become particularly evident in the arts: artworks of all genres reflect the irrational component of human nature far more radically than did the great artists of previous centuries, of whom Bacon names Michelangelo, Velasquez, Rembrandt and Goya as particular examples. To the artist, the self-​estrangement of modern individuals has rendered the paradox of rationally presenting what eludes rationality more stringent, while at the same time his/​her high degree of empathic and critical capacity remains unaltered. ‘I don’t think I’m gifted. I just think I’m receptive’,43 Bacon all too modestly said of himself. He nonetheless conceded that chance, which he also defines as ‘instinct’, must work together with will. These thoughts are by far not foreign to Friel who is known for his meticulous method of composition and the resulting perfection of form in dialectic correspondence with content; it culminates in his masterpiece, Faith Healer. Like Bacon, Friel affirms that an artist’s self-​criticism is indispensable for the expression of fundamental truths. ‘I think a lot of creation is made of (…) the self-​criticism of an artist, and very often I think probably what makes one artist better than another is that his critical sense is more acute’, Bacon says, but he also agrees with his interviewer that ‘it is a purely instinctive kind of criticism’, one that ‘has no defined criteria’44 In terms of Adornian aesthetics, the artist’s critique of his/​her work follows

David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon (London: Thames & Hudson, 2019), p. 161. 4 Sylvester, Interviews, p. 169. 4 43

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entirely the requirements of the object,45 and therefore cannot dispense with sensation and empathy.

Neither Reality Nor Dreams: The Inevitability of Chance Early on in Friel’s conception of Faith Healer, with his artist figure still conceived as the pompous ‘Seventh Son of the Seventh Son’, a passage in Sylvester’s Bacon-​interviews caught the playwright’s particular interest: q.: Can you say why you feel that an image will tend to look more inevitable the more it comes about by accident? f.b.: It hasn’t been interfered with. The hinges of form, come about by chance, seem to be more organic and to work more inevitably, the will has been subdued by the instinct.46 Friel writes in his private notes that Bacon’s answer gave him ‘the formal direction of the whole play, a peephole into the handling of S. S., the artist, the medium, chance’s handmaster. (…) (I)n some respects, S. S. worked as blindly as Francis Bacon, believing in chance, in accident.’47 Yet Friel certainly knew that Bacon’s working blindly was far more complex than it appears in this brief statement. Bacon was an avid reader, essentially influenced by Nietzsche’s philosophy of the revaluation of all values, by Aeschylos’ and Shakespeare’s presentation of violence and the dark abysses of human nature. Like Friel, he found important parallels to his own thinking in the ambiguous world view of T. S. Eliot and his idea of artistic self-​effacement. Letting himself be directed by chance, that is by accident and the unexpected, did not mean entrusting himself exclusively to some strange, external force, it rather 45 ‘Preponderance of the object’; Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. by E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 183. 46 Friel Papers, MS 37, 075/​1. The original text of Bacon’s answer in:  Sylvester, Interviews, p. 139. 47 Friel Papers, MS 37, 075/​1, 21 May.

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meant opening the mind fully to the unconscious, to the immediate, unrestrained sensations in the accidental encounter with persons, things, and situations. For Bacon, painting was ‘a game of chance’.48 ‘(T)o get nearer to a kind of essence’49 of things cannot be achieved by preconceived conceptions and conventional views, for ‘the deeper levels of personality (…) come over inevitably (…) without the brain interfering with the vitality of the image straight out of what we choose to call the unconscious with the foam of the unconscious locked around it –​which is its freshness’.50 This does not mean that Bacon’s paintings can only be explained on the basis of psychoanalysis. ‘Only dilettantes reduce everything in art to the unconscious,’51 Adorno remarks. What counts in art is the artist’s ability to catch a thing at its liveliest, ‘to keep the vitality of the accident and yet preserve a continuity’;52 it requires the rationality of a discerning mind and ordering capacity. ‘In artistic production’, Adorno writes, ‘unconscious forces are one sort of impulse, material among many others. They enter the work mediated by the law of form.’53 Although, according to Bacon, ‘one can only record one’s own feelings about certain situations as closely as one’s own nervous system as one possibly can’,54 the work, whether of visual, or performing art, must be objective –​mediated through subjectivity. It makes the artist a medium indeed, one that is powerful in that he/​she conveys a truth, powerless in that this truth cannot be absolute. This powerlessness is implied in Bacon’s statement: ‘One’s always hoping (…) to paint the one picture which will annihilate all the other ones, to concentrate everything in one painting.’55 Chance only conveys truths, never the one truth. Similar to the act of faith healing, painting was for Bacon process and result in one. Although as a painter more directly concerned with ‘images 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

Sylvester, Interviews, p. 58. Ibid., p. 190. Sylvester, Interviews, p. 139. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 9. Ibid., p. 14. Ibid. Sylvester, Interviews, p. 49. Sylvester, Interviews, p. 21.

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of appearance’ than a dramatist, he was conscious that all appearance is subject to continual change, that it is in itself processual rather than static. ‘The longer you work, the more the mystery deepens of what appearance is’,56 Bacon says in interview. To capture a ‘continuously floating thing’,57 requires ‘the will to make oneself completely free’58 –​free to receive the unexpected, unprecedented, and free from all personal views and attitudes, as these are informed by their respective sociocultural standardizations. It recalls T. S. Eliot’s demand of the artist’s ‘extinction of personality’, or ‘self-​sacrifice’,59 or, as Adorno has later put it: ‘Subjectively, art requires self-​exteriorization’; it is ‘practical insofar as it determines the person who experiences art and steps out of himself as a zoon politikon’.60 To Bacon, painting means to ‘catch the mystery of appearance within the mystery of the making’.61 The will to grasp the ungraspable, however, does not require ‘the will to lose one’s will’, as Bacon corrects his interviewer. Rather, it is the will to lose one’s ‘despair’,62 to rid oneself of the fear of the inability to transfer one’s reception of the ‘emanation’, or the ‘energy’63 of what immediately appears onto the canvas. Friel in turn felt anxious about the power of his plays to mesmerize and illuminate the minds of his audience. Considering the inevitability implied in chance, both Bacon and Friel with their profound knowledge of T. S. Eliot’s work, may have thought of his essay on Hamlet, whose problem, according to Eliot, is the lack of ‘the artistic “inevitability”’, that is the lack of an ‘objective correlative’ by which to express his emotions. As Eliot argues, ‘Hamlet (…) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear.’64 What links Bacon with Friel’s faith healer, and the dramatist himself, is their lack of Sylvester, Interviews, p. 136. Ibid. Ibid., p. 14. T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, in Frank Kermode, ed., Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot (London: Faber & Faber, 1975), p. 40. 60 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 243. 61 Ibid., p. 122. 62 Ibid., p. 14. 3 See: ibid., p. 196. 6 4 Kermode, Selected Prose, p. 48. 6 56 57 58 59

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any objective analogy and, consequently, their faith in the uncertainty of chance; but it is through chance, not will, that inevitable truth is revealed.

Grasping the Ungraspable Working ‘in a kind of haze of sensations and feelings and ideas’,65 Bacon nevertheless wanted his paintings to be as precise as possible  –​‘a terribly difficult thing –​a very ambiguous precision’.66 He often flung some paint at random on the canvas, sometimes with his bare hand, just to get started. This first stroke told him how to continue, one stroke of the brush being suggestive of the next. Bacon thus subjected himself to the dictate of what he called chance’s instrument, his paint: ‘(I)t does many things which are much better than I could make it do.’67 Never was the finished picture identical with Bacon’s ‘image in the head’, it had ‘a life completely of its own’. The fact that ‘one never gets what one wants’ is no disappointment for him, since chance also means possibility –​the possibility ‘that you get (…) something much more profound than what you really wanted’.68 Bacon speaks of the sudden ‘click’69 that he felt, when in his working process chance and critique, or will, coincided. Friel may have felt the same, when, as he put it in his sporadic diary, ‘the actual thing and the ideal thing, neither acknowledging the other, (…) at some point (…) converge(d).’70 It is, as David Sylvester formulates in the sense of Adornian dialectics, ‘a matter of reconciling opposites, (…) of making the thing contradictory things at once’.71

65 66 67 68 69 70 71

Sylvester, Interviews, p. 218. Ibid., p. 13. Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., pp. 17, 66. Brian Friel, ‘Extracts from a Sporadic Diary’ (translations), in Murray, Brian Friel, pp.  75/​76. Sylvester, Interviews, p. 114.

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Friel cannot be said to have relied on chance as totally as Bacon, if one considers his careful research of facts in preparation for his projected plays, or his intense studies of language with regard to Translations (1979) and his so-​called ‘Russian plays’. Only in Faith Healer is he directly focused on the artist-​healer’s subjection to his magical gift, and his disruption between inside and outside, between hope and despair. That for Friel chance is the vital core of his creative work, is suggested by his entry into his diary: ‘Occasionally, usually when the work had hit a bad patch, I make sporadic notes, partly as a discipline to keep me at the desk, partly in the wan hope that the casual jottings will induce something better.’72 Bacon’s reaction to such a stalemate is similar: ‘(S)ometimes, when I’ve been working and things were going so badly, I’ve just taken a brush and put the paint anywhere, not knowing what I was consciously doing, and suddenly the thing has sometimes begun to work.’73 Friel, renowned for his ‘extraordinary technical skills’,74 worked meticulously and with deliberation. Bacon too wanted his paintings to be ‘highly disciplined’, in spite of his irrational method of constructing them.75 ‘(T)he image is changing all the time while you’re working’,76 he tells Sylvester. His attempt to ‘keep the vitality of the accident and yet preserve continuity’77 in a painting reminds of Adorno’s definition of a work of art as ‘dialectic at a standstill’,78 a term Adorno adopted from his friend, Walter Benjamin. In Bacon’s paintings the dialectic of dynamics and stasis is directly visible: his human figures, animals, mythical creatures, even patches of grass appear to be in motion, the sounds of suffering or actual pain emanating from the human figures and portraits are almost audible; water seems to be spilt onto the picture at the very moment one looks at it. In all these expressions of movement, change, unexpectedness, one can perceive the 72 Murray, Brian Friel, p. 73. 73 Sylvester, Interviews, p. 114. 74 Thomas Kilroy, ‘Theatrical Text and Literary Text’, in Alan Peacock, ed., The Achievement of Brian Friel (Gerard’s Cross: Colin Smythe, 1993), p. 91. 75 See Sylvester, Interviews, p. 106. 76 Ibid., p. 140. 77 Ibid., p. 14. 78 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 84 and elsewhere throughout Adorno’s entire work.

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verification of negative dialectics as the antithesis of reification. Yet besides their ambiguity, Bacon wants his paintings to be ‘at once very precise’.79 Bacon says of his art: ‘I think that accident, which I would call luck is one of the most important and fertile aspects of it, because if anything works for me, I feel it is nothing I have made myself, but something which chance has given me.’80 At the same time the artist must carry out a selective process, which makes artistic creation, in Bacon’s words, ‘really a continuous fight between accident and criticism’.81 In the end, he says of a painting: ‘I never know how much it is pure chance and how much it is manipulation of it.’82 ‘Accident is always present and control is always present and there’s a tremendous overlap between the two,’83 Sylvester summarizes the artistic working process. A product of the reciprocal relation of chance and will, of the irrational and rationality, art is, according to Friel’s definition, ‘neither reality nor dreams’.84 Also Bacon speaks of an ‘in-​between’ art85 with reference to his artistic style that is neither figurative nor abstract. Bacon and Friel alike did not believe in completion as something finite. Friel’s plays are shockingly open-​ended as in Translations, or promisingly, as in Give Me Your Answer, Do (1997). Bacon in turn sought to express the enigmaticalness of his objects, or rather, of appearance. His affirmation: ‘I want to go on living, as I want to make my work better, out of vanity, you may say, I’ve got to live, I’ve got to exist.’86 On the one hand, it clearly distinguishes him from the self-​sacrifice of Friel’s faith healer, while on the other, both are identical in their desire for a mythical absolute. Throughout his career as a painter, Bacon longed to paint the one, all-​encompassing picture and hence destroyed more paintings than actually have survived. He either felt that the painted image failed to ‘trap’ the ‘deeper ways’ of the Sylvester, Interviews, p. 138. Sylvester, Interviews, p. 60. Ibid., p. 140. Ibid., p. 60. Ibid., p. 114. Brian Friel in: ‘Among the Ruins’, in Friel, Selected Stories (Oldcastle, Co. Meath: The Gallery Press, 1979), p. 109. 85 Sylvester, Interviews, p.75. 86 Ibid., p. 143. 79 80 81 82 83 84

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‘fact’ that ‘obsessed’87 him, or he attempted in vain to improve by will what was already good: ‘I try and take them further, and they lose all their qualities, and they lose everything.’88 Friel of course could not destroy plays of which he was critical, once they were produced on stage; but he distanced himself from earlier plays, or kept some pieces unpublished.

Can There Be Violence in Art? Referring to Faith Healer, Seamus Deane has pointed to the possibility that ‘the gift of healing is complicit with violence’, its ‘subject-​matter’ being ‘the twisted bodies (…) consequences of violence’,89 to which also the healer in the end succumbs. According to Friel’s private notes and the later play, the discrepancy between the faith healer’s character and gift is the cause of his inner tensions and marital conflicts. It shows that great art is possible not simply despite, but because of the contradictoriness of its author. While Bacon can say of himself: ‘my whole life goes into my work’,90 Friel, explicit about the separation between artists, still converges with Bacon as far as the actual creative process is concerned, both artists verifying T. S. Eliot’s demand of the complete separation between ‘the man who suffers and the mind which creates’.91 Conscious of their own subjection to the various forms of violence, they –​equally in various forms –​oppose it through art. Hardy’s aversion towards his wife’s ‘virtues’ must be viewed under the aspect the artist’s purpose to break down conventional facades and bourgeois morality. The natural consequence of the artist’s interrelation between public healing and self-​healing is, to a certain degree, the neglect of private 87 88 89 90 91

See: Sylvester, Interviews, p. 60. Ibid., p. 17. In: Alan Peacock, p. 111. Michael Peppiatt, Francis Bacon:  Studies for a Portrait (London:  Thames & Hudson, 2021), p. 23. Kermode, Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, p. 41.

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relations. From her conformist point of view, Grace’s ambivalence towards ‘the twisted man’ whom she thinks is ‘intent to hurt’92 her, is understandable, while on the other hand she subconsciously admires him as an artist. Teddy on his part (in various respects Hardy’s dialectic other), with all his benevolence and devotion recognizes ‘the killer instinct deep down in this man.’93 The dialectic that defines Bacon’s entire character and personality, Friel transfers onto his dramatic character, Frank Hardy. An avowed ‘non-​believer’94 Bacon understands his art as a ‘recording’, a ‘reporting’,95 of a reality that cannot be healed. Even ‘time doesn’t heal’ as he cites a line from T. S. Eliot’s poem ‘The Dry Salvages’.96 If Bacon’s art can be healing at all, it is by hurting, quite in the sense of Adorno’s thesis on modern art: it opposes society in that it ‘achieves opposition only through identification with that which it remonstrates’.97 Thus Bacon defines his art as ‘the attempt to remake the violence of reality itself ’.98 The humanist Friel, by contrast, reveals truths less blatantly, according to his motto for Molly Sweeney (1994), taken from Emily Dickinson’s (1830–​1886) poem ‘Tell all the Truth but tell it slant –​Success in Circuit lies’. In his preparative notes for Faith Healer Friel warns himself not to create ‘a bitter, cynical-​tonged Frank’, and he quotes the playwright Harold Brenton’s (1942–​) remark that laughter is ‘the profound means of our time’.99 Bacon’s paintings, on the other hand, are meant to ‘violently’ affect ‘the nervous system’100 of the viewer, conveying a sense of isolation and loss, the outer facade no longer exists. ‘Who today has been able to record anything that comes across to us as a fact without deep injury to the image?’101 Bacon asks. As Bacon’s interviewer observes, most people perceive a ‘distinct presence or threat 9 2 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101

Ibid., p. 345. Ibid., p. 363. Sylvester, p. 25. Ibid., p. 69. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (London: Faber & Faber, 1995), p. 27. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 133. Sylvester, Interviews, p. 94. Friel Papers, MS 37,075/​2 of 25 and 11 June. Sylvester, p. 94. Ibid., p. 46.

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of violence’102 in Bacon’s distorted portraits and also in his human figures that are often denuded, in awkward positions, or in most intimate situations. To this, the painter replies with characteristic sobriety that perhaps he had ‘from time to time been able to clear away one or two of the veils or screens’ in our otherwise ‘screened existence’.103 Bacon therefore fully agrees to Sylvester’s formulation that his painting is an attempt ‘to bring order into the chaos of life’.104 Adorno has put the idea equivocally with his dictum that ‘art’s task today is to bring chaos into order’.105 Bacon’s idea of capturing ‘different levels of feeling in one image’106 naturally calls for a non-​realistic style of expression, in which the unconscious and the conscious visibly cooperate. Though not deeming ‘distort’ the proper word, Bacon wants ‘to distort the thing far beyond appearance, but in the distortion bring it back to a recording of appearance’.107 With this he directs his notion of violence from the extrinsicality of appearance towards the vigorousness of the artist’s emotions. Bacon’s characteristic dialectic stance does not only imply the basic unity of physis and psyche, but also that of self and other: ‘When you are painting somebody, you know that you are, of course, trying to get near not only to their appearance but also to the way they have affected you.’108 The French writer and ethnologist, Michèl Leiris (1901–​1990), whom Bacon portrayed in a triptych, raises the rhetorical question, whether ‘the gesture of the artist’s hand that bursts the surface of things in order to recompose them according to his feelings, thereby penetrating into the innermost core of his objects, is not the most natural way of loving things’.109 In fact, Bacon said of himself that

1 02 103 104 105 106 107 108 109

Ibid., p. 92. Ibid., p. 94. Ibid., p. 214. Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 222. Sylvester, p. 46. Sylvester, p. 46. Ibid., p. 150. Michèl Leiris, Bacon Picasso Masson, translated into German from the French original by Heribert Becker (Frankfurt a. M./​Paris:  Qumran, 1982), p. 22, my translation.

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he ‘painted to be loved’.110 For him, life, sexuality and painting are inseparably intertwined under the sign of violence in the dual sense as physicality and emotion, but also as destruction and construction. His greed for love is at the same time also a ‘greed for life’, to him the ‘will to power’.111 What in his portraits is commonly interpreted as the infliction of an injury is in reality an act of love. Bacon mentions Oscar Wilde’s paradoxical claim that ‘you kill the thing you love’,112 though without insisting on its verity. Like Beckett, Bacon took life as it is, without interpreting it in any sense.113 His metaphysics, if thus it can be called, is entirely profane, and yet it is not in absolute contrast with the humanism of Brian Friel, for whom ‘life is all we have’.114

Sacrifice of the Work: Sacrifice to the Work Robert Hullot-​Kentor, the English translator of Adorno’s Ästhetische Theorie, points to quite a different sort of violence in art, of which Francis Bacon instinctively must have been aware. In his volume of collected essays on T. W. Adorno titled things beyond resemblance Hullot-​Kentor, repeatedly referring to Bacon, mentions a further reason why Bacon destroyed so many of his paintings. In the Sylvester interviews, filmed by BBC under the title The Brutality of Fact,115 Bacon adds a reason until then not mentioned in other interviews. (Meanwhile a new BBC documentary appeared in 2017, titled A Brush With Violence.) Bacon paradoxically slashed 110 Quoted in Anna Maria Wieland, Francis Bacon (Munich/​Berlin/​London/​New York: Prestel, 2009), p. 87. 111 Bacon had a thorough knowledge of the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and has been known to quote him ever so often. 112 Ibid., p. 49. 113 Bacon in Silvester, Interviews, p. 153: ‘I think of life as meaningless; but we give it meaning during our own existence. We create certain attitudes which give it meaning (…), though they in themselves are meaningless, really.’ 114 Murray, Brian Friel, p. 31. 115 Bacon’s characterization of Picasso’s paintings, in: Sylvester, Interviews, p. 204.

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his paintings not only because of their alleged deficiency but also because of their completion. ‘Francis Bacon (…) tended to destroy all paintings that were not removed from his studio, and particularly the best ones’,116 Hullot-​Kentor informs. Rather than being a weird feature in the painter, it shows his acute awareness of what Adorno has explained as the inherent antinomy of art. In Aesthetic Theory he relates it to the dichotomy of modernity: ‘Scars of damage and disruption are the modern’s seal of authenticity (…), explosion is one of its invariants.’117 Not only is the aesthetic unity of a work of art opposed to the disruption and estrangement of modernity, which it presents (and mimetically heals), but by its very concreteness of form it contradicts the unobjectifiable truth that it wants to express. As the expression of something, a work of art cannot avoid its own objectification and at the same time must remain ambiguous and enigmatic. Hullot-​Kentor observes that because of this awareness, ‘all modern artists (…) have had to struggle against the impulse to destroy their work.’118 Bacon wanted to capture in his paintings the ephemeral, mysterious other, to him the ‘inevitable’ truth of a thing, whereas as objects, his paintings present the evitable. He thereby unknowingly exemplified Adorno’s definition of dialectics as the intransigence towards reification in any form.119 ‘Bacon always took a certain pleasure in sacrificing his own work. A pleasure seasoned with pain,’120 as his biographers write. Yet he must have felt the same longing for absolute fulfilment that impelled Friel’s faith healer like all truth-​seekers. The poet and novelist Stephen Spender (1909–​1995): recalls that before Bacon died, he hoped ‘to do something really beautiful and not ugly as all my paintings are.’121 The discussion between David Sylvester and Bacon on the issue of the inevitable and the accidental caught Friel’s particular attention not only Robert Hullot-​Kentor, Things Beyond Resemblance Collected Essays on THEODOR W. ADORNO (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), p. 186. 117 Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, p. 23. 118 Ibid. 119 See Adorno, ‘Prismen’, in Kultur und Gesellschaft 1 (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1977), p. 26, my translation. 1 20 Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, Francis Bacon, p. 159. 121 Quoted ibid., p. 459. 116

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as far as the artist’s tormenting liminality between power and powerlessness is concerned, but also with regard to the tension between the literal text of his plays and their nonverbal significance.122 As the effect of a play largely depends on its being staged, the decision about its life or death is mainly with its audiences. Friel could not and would not ‘sacrifice’ his work in the way Bacon did, but, as has already been mentioned, he was critical of a number of his plays. Yet when his artist-​healer, Frank Hardy, surrenders himself to his killers, he does so not out of resignation, but as an act of self-​liberation, which demonstrates authenticity and strength in face of deceptive reality. Parallel to this, Hardy’s self-​sacrifice can also be taken as a metaphor for the artist who gives himself giving himself up entirely to that Baconean inevitability, the hidden truth of things that can neither be ‘manipulated’, as Bacon puts it, nor possessed, at the same time challenging the artistic work with the possibility of renewal and reconcilement for the sake of truth.

The Artist as Dissembler Analogous to the strange doubleness of works of art is the dissembling character of their creators, magicians and imposters in one. In an interview in 1982, Friel speaks of ‘the element of the charlatan that there is in all creative work’.123 Bacon’s admission ‘I should have been, I don’t know, a con-​man’,124 reappears in Frank Hardy’s above-​quoted anxious self-​ questioning ‘Am I a con man?’ Adorno, however, acknowledges the truthfulness of the dissembling artist, comparing him/​her to a clown rather than deeming him/​her a deceiver. In Negative Dialectics he writes: ‘The unnaive thinker knows how far he remains from the object of his thinking, and yet he must always talk as if he had it entirely. This brings him to the 122 Also see:  Thomas Kilroy, ‘Theatrical Text and Literary Text’, in Peacock, The Achievement of Brian Friel, pp. 91–​102. 123 Interview with Fintan O’Toole, in Murray, Brian Friel, p. 111. 124 Quoted inside the cover of Wieland, Francis Bacon.

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point of clowning.’125 For Adorno, the image of a clown is not at all ridiculous, but similar to the unconditioned psyche of children which, as Adorno elsewhere observes, has been preserved in every artist. Friel, in his short story ‘Among the Ruins’,126 movingly demonstrates how much nearer to paradisical happiness and joy a child can be than the average adult. Absorbed in his self-​invented play, little Peter creates his world out of his own unspoilt self; his mind ‘has not been interfered with’, as Bacon said about his images that by chance have come organically into his mind. According to Freud, the human process of growing up, of establishing an Ego is realized at the cost of our natural instincts. With his psychological insight Adorno therefore claims that the fantastic language of the clown is understandable only to the receptive mind of a child’, a capability ‘irretrievably lost’ by adults.127 Bacon’s personality exhibits in particular this doubleness of the naiveté of a child and deepest human experience.

The Two Sides of the Coin Friel has characterized the imagination of the Irish dramatist, Tom Murphy (1935–​2018), as ‘antic, bleak, agitated, bewildered, capable of great cruelty and great compassion, (…) a kind of imagination that in a different culture would probably find its voice in music or painting.’128 Excepting compassion, Friel seems to have recognized this kind of imagination in Francis Bacon. But when asked, in 1970, the critical time of the Northern Irish Troubles, about his own bleakness, he admitted that he was ‘by nature a bleak sort of person, and whatever comedy there is the 125 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 14. 126 Peter Fallon, ed., Brian Friel, Selected Stories (Loughcrew/​Oldcastle: Gallery Press, 1994), pp. 100–​109. 127 See Theodor W. Adorno, Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I (Frankfurt a. M.:  Suhrkamp, 1977), p. 363:  ‘Natur, so unerbittlich verdrängt vom Prozess des Erwachsenwerdens, wie jene Sprache den Erwachsenen unwiederbringlich ist.’ 128 Murray, Brian Friel, p. 89.

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absurd sort’.129 With Friel’s own sense of compassion, his plays are associated with suffering and death less radically than Bacon’s paintings. Again, he proves his natural double vision of suffering and relief: ‘(T)he brief period’ of our lives is to a great portion ‘spent either in working or crying. This general gloom is only very seldom relieved by periods of some kind of levity. (…) I think this has got to be portrayed on the stage.’130 In Bacon’s paintings, on the other hand, outrage and revolt prevail. And yet, his response to the generally unfavourable public reaction –​‘(P) eople always have a feeling of mortality about my paintings’ –​131 shows his natural ability to unite in himself opposite poles. That he had ‘a feeling of mortality all the time’ is no less a sign of Bacon’s decadence than does violence in his painting signal a rejection of life. Bacon’s focus is on death as a natural part of life: ‘If life excites you, its opposite like a shadow, death, must excite you. Perhaps not excite you, but you’re aware of it like the turn of a coin between life and death.’132 Thus the colour and structure of meat at a butcher’s reminded him of the inexorable truth that beings must live on other beings; it also made him feel the horror and simultaneous beauty of life. It was the ‘violent’ sensation of this ambiguity, which impelled him to project his feelings onto the canvas. Meat and human flesh became paint as dead and living substance, actually the two sides of life. Many people, reminded of their own ‘animal nature’ and transitoriness, find Bacon’s pictures offensive. ‘It is the reality, not the fantasy, in the art of Bacon that horrifies’,133 the art historian John Rothenstein (1901–​1992) remarked. ‘(H)uman consciousness to this day is too weak to sustain the experience of death, perhaps even too weak for its conscious acceptance’,134 Adorno observes in Negative Dialectics, and he explains that ‘(t)he more individuals are estranged from life, the more abrupt and frightening is

1 29 130 131 132 133 134

Ibid., p. 25. Ibid. Sylvester, Interviews, p. 91. Sylvester, Interviews, p. 91. Quoted in Stevens and Swan, Francis Bacon, p. 456. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 369.

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death’.135 Bacon’s ‘re-​making’ of pain is a mute scream for healing and after all gives proof of his faith in wholeness. Unlike Bacon, Friel has not made any personal statements about death, but explicitly or implicitly it is present in most of his plays, whether as death from age or illness, as suicide, homicide, political murder or as self-​sacrifice, theatrical or metaphoric. It is always inseparable from the ruling conditions of historical reality, of critical periods in which the vulnerability and the simultaneous resilience of life become most obvious. With the underlying tone of reconcilement, the dialectic unity of life and death finds particular expression in Faith Healer, but even more emphatically in Friel’s late work, Performances (2003). Death is a mystery. ‘Attempts to express death in language are futile,’136 Adorno writes. If it were the absolute end, all truth would come to nothing, for truth wants to be lasting, he argues. With death and eternity, being beyond rational comprehension, Adorno sees the human hope for redemption transferred onto materiality, onto pure existence,137 or, as he stated in 1965 in his lectures on metaphysics, ‘Metaphysics, I say, has slipped into material existence. (…).’ Its injunction: ‘“Thou shalt not inflict pain” (…) is a metaphysical principle pointing beyond mere facticity.’138 Frank Hardy’s faith healing may be regarded as Friel’s ‘objective correlative’ for the possibility of reconciliation of fragmentary fact with its metaphysical whole. David Sylvester’s interviews of Francis Bacon were not Friel’s exclusive source for Faith Healer. In his private notes he considers ‘the possibility of a creative confluence of the distinctive elements of Steiner + F. Bacon + the Faith healer (sic). (…) Steiner –​language; Bacon –​chance; faith healer –​the vehicle of the intrusion of now’.139 The passages Friel copied 1 35 136 137 138

See: ibid., p. 370 (modified translation by me). Ibid., p. 371. See: Adorno, Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft I, p. 262. Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics Concept and Problems, ed. by Rolf Tiedemann, trans. by E. Jephcott (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), p. 117. 139 MS 37, 075/​1. As Friel’s handwriting in his personal notes is sometimes difficult to decipher, Zosia Kuczynska, in her article ‘Brian Friel, Francis Bacon, and Faith Healer’, p. 320, reads ‘indecision’ for ‘intrusion’. Friel’s word definitely consists of nine letters, not ten. ‘Indecision of now’, with ‘now’ understood as the moment of the cognition of truth, the magic moment of healing, would hardly make sense.

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in his notes from an unnamed author’s ‘Confessions of a Faith Healer’ tell of the plight of a person ‘always suspended between a supreme confidence (…) and a gruelling sense of nothingness, of failure. (…) I was always a mere instrument, (…) exhausted with vigilance –​because the movement might come and go in an instant, the gust of mind, the volatile spirit, and the instrument has to be at pitch for benefit to be struck from it.’140 Friel saw in the artist an instrument, albeit an uncertain one, in the ‘battle against the crippled civilization’.141 He knew that a dramatist ‘cannot appear to exhibit the same outrageous daring that the painter shows’.142 Although he shared, to a great extent, Bacon’s ambivalent experience of creation, their motivation, besides their artistic media and methods differed: Friel believed in the healing of human society, even though as a possibility that may never become a historical reality. In this he accords with Adorno’s conception of utopia, realized only in aesthetic experience, yet always present as possibility. Therefore, in line with the dialectic principle of ‘necessary uncertainty’, Friel closes his fundamental declaration, ‘The Theatre of Hope and Despair’, with the word by Camus that ‘in the middle of the ruins on the other side of nihilism we are preparing a renaissance. But few know it.’143 That Bacon, on the other hand, bluntly admits: ‘I’ve never believed in anything’,144 ought not be taken at its face value. He regards ‘belief ’ as the standardizing, delusive and crippling ideology which he is aimed to destroy. In this sense, life is meaningless, free from every superimposed definition. It is exciting as the richness and unexpectedness of chance, creating in Bacon an attitude of ‘exhilarated despair’.145 Michael Peppiatt sees in Bacon’s painting ‘an act of faith and an act of transgression’.146 The artist’s faith in the ‘inevitable’ truth behind the surface of appearance compels him to destroy the ‘bourgeois fear of the unity of oppositions’, to fight 140 141 142 143 144 145 146

MS 37,  075/​1. Murray, Brian Friel, p. 23. Ibid., p. 19. Murray, Brian Friel, p. 24. Bacon in the Video Kaleidoscope. Last Interviews (1991). Sylvester, Interviews, p. 96. Peppiatt, Bacon, p. 118.

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the ‘prejudice that one can create the new only by the destruction of the old’,147 and to disrupt repressive systems and conventions. Bacon’s mode of redemption is unredemptive. His deformed human figures and faces, and his method of their portrayal are the direct expression of the painter’s tormented emotions at life’s violence, and at the same time his violent expression of love for this life. As his characteristic paradoxicality, Bacon aesthetically transcends alienation and reification not through reconciliation, but through its intensification,148 as the philosopher and aesthetician Christoph Menke (1958 -​) observes in his evaluation of Bacon’s paintings. Adorno’s colleague, Herbert Marcuse (1898–​1979), another prominent member of the Frankfurt School, perceives in Bacon’s aesthetic estrangement of estranged objects the joyful expression of the sensuality of non-​affirmative art. Marcuse has compared it to a dance on the volcano, or a game with death.149 Faith Healer is Friel’s manifestation of Bacon’s attitude both as an artist and a human being, which Marcuse has described as ‘reconciliation by confronting evil, not by fleeing from it’.150 In his private notes Friel quotes from another unnamed source: ‘There is a freedom that outfaces death by literally facing it and taking it in.’151 ***

147 Peppiatt,  ibid. 1 48 See: Christoph Menke, ‘Schrecklich schön: Bemerkungen zu Marcuse und Koppe, im Blick auf Bacon’, in Institut für Sozialforechung (Institute for Social Research), ed., Kritik und Utopie im Werk von Herbert Marcuse (Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1992), p. 270 (my translation). 149 Ibid., p. 267 (paraphrased by me). 150 See: ibid., p. 264 (my translation). 151 Friel Papers, MS 37, 075/​1, 24.05. 1975.

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Russell, Richard Rankin, Modernity, Cummunity, and Place in Brian Friel’s Drama. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014. Sartre, Jean Paul, Existentialism and Human Emotions. New York:  Philosophical Library Inc., 1957. Scheible, Hartmut, Theodor W. Adorno. Hamburg: Rororo Bildmonographien, 1996. Schweppenhäuser, Gerhard, Adorno und die Folgen. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2021. Shakespeare, William, Hamlet. Steiner, George, After Babel. Oxford/​New York: OUP, 1992. —​—​, Language and Silence. London: Faber & Faber, 1985. Stevens, Mark and Swan, Annalyn, Francis Bacon. Revelations. London:  William Collins, 2021. Sylvester, David, The Brutality of Fact. Interviews with Francis Bacon. London: Thames & Hudson, 2019. Wellmer, Albrecht, ‘Wahrheit, Schein, Versöhnung’, in Jürgen Habermas and Ludwig v. Friedeburg, eds, Adorno-​Konferenz 1983. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp, 1983, pp. 138–​176. White, Harry, ‘Brian Friel and the Condition of Music’, Irish University Review (Special Issue: Brian Friel), 29/​1 (Spring/​Summer 1999), 6–​15. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-​Philosophicus, with an Introduction by Bertrand Russell. London: Kegan Paul, 1960. Yeats, William Butler, Autobiographies. London: Macmillan, 1980. —​—​, The Poems. London: Everyman, 1994.

Index

Adorno, W.  Theodor Aesthetic Theory  23, 68, 95, 115  Dialectic of Enlightenment  39, 41, 104, 116  ‘Fragment on Music and Language‘ 28  Minima Moralia XIV,  33, 53, 62, 70, 83  musical compositions  19  Negative Dialectics  1, 9, 15, 118  Notes to Literature 32  ‘Resignation‘ XVI,  43  Aeschylean tragedy  5  aesthetic experience  50, 51  Aesthetic Movement  80, 81  Age of Enlightenment  19  ambiguity 45  American system  19–​20, American way of life  16  Amorbach  10, 11, 14  Archer, William  73, 80  Augustine, St., De Civitate Dei 13  Auschwitz 19 

Brenton, Harold  112 

Bacon, Francis XVI,  102–​121 Baudelaire, Charles  81  Bayreuth Festival Ensemble, Richard Wagner’s Opera House  11  BBC documentary, A Brush with Violence 114  Beckett, Samuel  114, Eleutheria 68  Benjamin, Walter  59, 109  Berg, Alban  4  Boa Island, Co. Fermanagh  Brecht, Bertolt  7 

Eliot, T. S.   XIV, 42–​43, 46, 69, 101, 105, 107, 11, Four Quartetts   64, 71, ‘Little Gidding‘ 64, 71, ‘The Dry Salvages‘ 112 Ellmann, Richard   81  Eros   71 

Camus, Albert  120 Celtic mythology  13  Chekhov, Anton  21  Civil Rights March 1972  4  Colgan, Michael  65, 85, 86  Columba, St.  4, 40  Columbia University  XVI, 4  commercialized culture  20  Communist Manifesto  19  Corinthians I,  13 67  Critical Theory  XIV, 8, 17, 28, 42, 44, 51, 53, 55, 104  cultural identity   22, 52  Culture Industry   20, 22, 52  damaged life   10, 53 Darwin, Charles, The Origin of Species 30, Darwinian Revolution   80  Derry XIII, Derry’s Bloody Sunday   34  Dickinson, Emily   112  Durcan, Paul   102 

Field Day Theatre Company   XIII, 23, 24 Fifth Province   59  Frankfurt School   55 

128 Frankfurt Institute for Social Research   XVI, 6, 7, 8–​9, 82  Freud, Sigmund 34, Civilization and its Discontents   10  Friel, Brian  PLAYS  Aristocrats   29, 47, 50, 89  Communication Cord, The   36  Dancing at Lughnasa   29, 36, 48, 51  Enemy Within, The   40  Faith Healer   XV,37, 40, 51, 87, 88, 97, 98, 101, 104, 105, 109, 111, 112, 119, 121  The Freedom of the City   34  Give Me Your Answer, Do   XVII, 29, 34, 41, 43, 52, 60, 63, 88, 92, 99, 110  Molly Sweeney   14, 39, 64, 87, 89, 97, 112  Performances   14, 28, 40, 46, 63, 64–​ 65, 66, 68 70, 72, 86, 119  Philadelphia, Here I Come   8, 19, 36, 97  Translations   10, 13, 14, 20, 21, 25, 31, 36, 37, 42, 45, 47, 48, 57, 59, 60, 74, 102, 109, 110  Wonderful Tennessee   1, 12, 29  SHORT STORY  ‘Among the Ruins‘  XI, 117  OTHER TEXTS  ‘Kitezh‘ 62  ‘Lighter Side of Life, The‘  5  ‘Self-​Portrait‘  XI, 8, 9, self-​portrait for BBC, 5, 16  ‘Seven Notes for a Festival Programme   62  ‘Sporadic Diaries‘  96  ‘Theatre of Hope and Despair, The‘  XII, 32, 39, 56, 57, 59, 95, 120 

Index Glenties, Co. Donegal   8, 12 Guthrie, Tyrone   16  Habermas, Jürgen   41, 50 Heaney, Seamus   10, 11, 22, 24, 37, 47  Hegel, G. W. F.   85  Heine, Heinrich, ‘On Wings of Song‘  29  Holocaust XVI,   2, 84  Home Rule   30  Homer   51  Horkheimer, Max   XIV, 6, 7, 19, 39, 54, 104  Hove van, Ivo   78, 79, 89  Hullot-​Kentor, Robert   114, 115  Ibsen, Henrik, Hedda Gabler 73–​77, 80, 85, 88, A Doll’s House   76 indeterminacy   31  Industrial Revolution   74  Ireland, Land War 30, Catholic minority in Northern Ireland 44, The Troubles   117  Janácek, Leos, ‘Intimate Letters‘ 27, 71, Second String Quartett No.   2 29,  65–​71 Janus   13  Joyce, James,   8, 26, 82  Jung, Carl Gustav   34  Kant, Immanuel   3 Karplus, Gretel,   6  Kitezh, the bells of   62  kosmos   54  Krakauer, Siegfried   3  Lazarsfeld, Paul   6 Leiris, Michel   113  Löwenthal, Leo   8, 82  Los Angeles   6  Lukácz, Georg   4 

129

Index Mann, Thomas, Dr. Faustus   12 (Note 46) Marcuse, Herbert   121  Marx, Karl   19, 34  Maynooth   13  Mendelssohn, Felix, ‘On Wings of Song‘ 29  More, Thomas   54–​55  Morris, William   80  Muphy, Tom   117  Murray, Christopher   46, 65  myth   XV  New York   6 Nietzsche, Friedrich 105, The Birth of Tragedy   5  O’Casey, Sean, ‘The Power of Laughter‘ 88 Otherworld   14  O’Toole, Fintan   7, 61, 76, 86  Oxford   6  Peppiatt, Michael   120 Plato   55  Rae, Stephen XIII.   23 Roget’s Thesaurus   103  Rothenstein, John   118  Russell, Richard Rankin   33, 51 

Schönberg, Arnold   4 self-​reflection   32, 40  Shaw, G. B.   82  Spender, Stephen   115  Steiner, George 87, After Babel   26, 58, 102, 119  Sylvester, David 108, 109, 110, The Brutality of Fact   102, 114, 115, 119  Termon, god of boundaries   13 Tillich, Paul   4  ‘Truth, Beauty and the Good‘  92  uncertainty   61 urban society   16  Utopia   53, 55, 58-​59, fulfilled utopia   65, ‘realized utopia‘  56, 61  Weil, Felix   XVI Wellmer, Albrecht,   74  White, Harry   29, 64  Wilde, Oscar   81, 114  Wittgenstein, Ludwig   34–​35, Tractatus   63  Yeats, W. B.   80