Traumatizing Romanticism in Brian Friel's Faith Healer

Traumatizing Romanticism in Brian Friel's Faith Healer BRUCE WYSE The Romantics made the poet or artist into the paradigm human being. Modernists have only accentuated this. The bringer ojepiphanies cannot he denied a central place in human life. But the denial oj the epiphanies of being has made the very process of bringing them problematic and mysterious. There is a new reflexive turn, and poetry or literature tends to focus on the poet. the writer, or on what it is to transfigure through writing. It is amazing how much art in the twentieth century f.. .j is on one level at least thinly disguised allegory about the artist and his work. Charles Taylor 48 I If we didn't know how to dramatize, we wouldn't he able to leave ourselves. We would live isolated and turned in on ourselves. But a sort o/rupture - in anguish -leaves us at the limit a/tears: in such a case we lose ourselves, we/orgel ourselves and commu~ nicate with all elusive beyond. Georges Bataille I J Declan Klberd declares that Brian Friel's 1979 play, Faith Healer, "may well be the finest play to come out of Ireland since 1.M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World. It is also, without a doubt, one of the most derivative works of art to be produced in Ireland this century" (211). Kiberd is particularly struck by the play's "remoulding of the legend of Deirdre of the Sorrows" (212), but he also aligns the play with certain ideas of Samuel Beckett and comments on the play's indebtedness to Faulkner's The Sound and the FUIY (although Browning's The Ring and the Book and perhaps the dramatic monologue tradition ·itself deserve some acknowledgement as well). Other critics have emphasized the play's continuities with the poetry and the drama of Yeats, and even its tangential elaboration of certain playful paradoxes in the writings of Wilde (see Murray, "Friel's Emblems"; McGrath). One vast and rich, not to Modern Drama, 47:3 (Fall 2004) 446 Romanticism in Brian Friel's Faith /-Iealer 447 mention conspicuous, field of intertextuality that has not been seriously engaged in explications of Faith Healer is that contested canonical construct and contradictory discursive fomtation called Romanticism, and in particular English Romanticism.' English Romanticism, at least as a historically delineated rather than a transhistorical movement. seems to stand at several removes from Friel's play, mediated by more recent and national textual instances. Nevertheless, even in the absence of any outright allusion, the portrayal of the faith healer's troublesome and awesome power, his intra-psychic strife, his transfonnation of others, and his visionary preparation for death can be approached as displaced variations on several motifs, concerns, and ideas of English Romanticism. Faith Healer is a cumulative and dialectical sequence of four monologues by three characters - an itinerant faith healer, Frank Hardy; his wife, Grace; and his manager, Teddy - providing variously inflected, divergent, and, at times, discrepant reports on their life on the road in rural Wales and Scotland. As such, it throws into relief the life projects of the three, demonstrating how events are subjectively incorporated or put to use in narrative self-constitution, while also disclosing the bad faith and blind spots of the characters, their defensive fantasies, self-delusions, and self-objectifications. In tum, Frank, Grace, and Teddy narratively rehearse their versions of their shared or at least overlapping pasts, at the same time disclosing their present circumstances, their orientation towards the events of the past, and their former and present dispositions towards one other. Each ensuing account does not merely contribute another layering to the representation of the elusive past, but significantly qualifies, corrects, or contests the preceding version or versions of events. Friel's audience is challenged to reflect on the credibility of each witness to the past. to consider the motives and interests of each narrator, to detect distortions, to attend to omissions, and to reconstruct, tentatively at least, certain events of the past. As several key incidents are revisited and reshaped, the conjectural past begins to acquire a certain density. This composite of the past, however, remains heterogeneous and, in some...