"Something is Being Eroded": The Agrarian Epistemology of Brian Friel's Translations

Brian Friel's conception of community finds dramatic expression in his affinity for fictionalized local settings, rooted in the recognizable geographic region of northwest Ireland. While many critics have noted Friel's affinity for local culture and community, few critics have noted the epistemological and thematic implications of his rural philosophy. His most famous drama, Translations (1980), can be reread through agrarian theories about the interrelationship between people and the land. In the twentieth century, the most renowned of these philosophies was that developed by the Agrarian writers from the American South, published in the collection of essays I'll Take My Stand in 1930. In Ireland, later in the century, Patrick Kavanagh's call for contemporary Irish authors to write in a parochial, not a provincial, manner, was likewise instructive for Friel.

The playwright has developed his own well-defined agrarian theory that proposes the continued need for a viable rural farming community in Ireland as a counterweight to the rapid urbanization of the country. This conviction springs from both Friel's immersion in rural Irish culture, and from his realization that such a culture contains a premodern epistemology. Far from nostalgic, Translations articulates Friel's alarm at the loss of local community, both in early nineteenth-century Ireland and worldwide in the present. The play inveighs against the advent of the machine in rural culture, which Friel views as evicting laborers from communities, and against the concurrent Enlightenment emphasis on empiricism and the individual—all of which destroy communal identity.

Much of the criticism of Translations has focused on the ways in which the play depicts the decline of the Irish language. Such a narrow reading runs the risk of relegating the discussion solely to an Irish and British context, when linguistic displacement is, in fact, part of a larger attenuation of rural culture and epistemology brought about by global modernization. Linguistically oriented criticism of Translations tends to argue that it sanctions Irish cultural nationalism and critiques English imperialism; but Friel's play actually implies that both ideologies have been complicit in ushering in pernicious aspects of modernity that have, in their turn, slowly killed rural Irish farming communities and the antimodern, communal worldview these villages espouse. The universality of Friel's play becomes clear only when the linguistic, cultural, and epistemological tragedies that occur in Translations are recognized as Friel's lament for a larger, cross-cultural decline in communal ways of perceiving reality.

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Friel's imaginative observation of Ballybeg has established it as his analog to Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha, his own "postage stamp" of native soil. In his artistic concern for local, rural culture and in his apprehension about the deleterious effects of modernity, Friel shares a number of concerns with the agrarian movement in the United States as espoused by a number of southern writers. His affinity with agrarianism may be surprising for those critics who view Friel as a quintessentially Irish writer, but he has always disavowed that term; he told John Boyd in a 1970 interview that he views his own work in a much broader context: "This business of seeing oneself as an Irishman writing in an Irish tradition I would find very limiting and perhaps oppressive.¹ Friel emphatically proclaimed his allegiance to agrarian culture in an early interview: "I think I'm sort of a peasant at heart. I'm certainly not 'citified' and I never will be. There are certain atmospheres which I find totally alien to me and I'm much more at ease in a rural setting."²

The concern of Translations with the land, with agricultural practices, and with local crop conditions suggests a deep interest in the continued viability of local agricultural economies on Friel's part, while also displaying a related anxiety about the advent of modernity in Ballybeg and its ideological impact on an archaic culture's epistemology. The most ominous...