Impure and Complicated Truth: Brian Friel's Faith Healer and John McGahern's "The Country Funeral"

Brian Friel and John McGahern belong to a generation of Irish writers that came of age well after the Irish Literary Revival; Friel was born in 1929 and McGahern in 1934. Oddly, little work has been done to examine affinity that existed between the two writers—despite their long friendship, and despite the admiration that Friel has openly expressed for McGahern's work.¹ Two texts that provide illuminating points of contact between the two writers are Friel's play Faith Healer (1979) and McGahern's short story "The Country Funeral," which first appeared as the final story in his Collected Stories (1992).

In general, contemporary criticism disdains the notion of "influence," in which one work is characterized as derivative from an earlier one. Julia Kristeva distinguished "intertextuality" from influence in Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art (1980). There, she affirmed that intertexuality is the passing of meaning from a writer to a reader through the mediation of "codes" derived from other texts.² Essentially, intertextuality, according to Kristeva, means the implied presence of a text inside another text—rather than the more obvious, overt presence that "influence" denotes.

The formal and thematic similarities between the two works—though perhaps not immediately apparent—are such that Faith Healer can be regarded as an important intertext through which to read McGahern's story. The authors' treatment and representation of memory, place, and art in their respective works suggest useful and illuminating points of comparison. Both of these literary products probe the unstable nature of memory, and also consider the intimate connection between a person and the physical space he inhabits. At the same time, both writers champion subjective, imaginative truth over objective reality. Both writers refuse to allow their narratives to descend into purely mimetic, realistic accounts of people, place, and identity. Thus, Friel and McGahern in Faith Healer and "The Country Funeral" follow Wilde's philosophy that art should be allowed to create the terms for existence and not passively imitate those conditions. These two works carry additional importance in the careers of Friel and McGahern, as they encapsulate and anticipate dominant concerns and themes in their respective literary oeuvres.

The initial similarity between Faith Healer and "The Country Funeral" is their use of three narrators to offer contradictory versions of the same story— though, of course, the presence of three opposing narrators in a text surely did not originate with Friel's play.³ Friel's Frank, Grace, and Teddy provide substantially different accounts of their lives on the road as they travel around the United Kingdom and Ireland offering Frank's services as a faith healer.⁴ In "The Country Funeral," the disputed narrative is found in the differing accounts of three brothers who are at odds over whether their childhoods spent in Leitrim with their uncle Peter were happy or hellish.

But there are also contextual similarities. Friel and McGahern belonged to a generation of Irish artists that faced problems that did not confront the previous generation, but was problematic in Friel and McGahern's era. As Friel once wrote,

The generation of Irish writers immediately before mine never allowed this burden to weigh them down. They learned to speak Irish, took their genetic purity for granted, and soldiered on. For us today the situation is more complex. We are more concerned with defining our Irishness than with pursuing it. We want to know what the word 'native' means, what the word 'foreign' means. We want to know if the words have any meaning at all. And persistent considerations like these erode old certainties and help clear the building site.⁵

Both Friel and McGahern used their art to depict rural Ireland. Yet neither author believed that texts should be used to merely describe an already existing world but rather, should create new realities.⁶ This accounts for the uncertainty that both authors create around events and characters in both their works.

McGahern, paraphrasing Oscar Wilde in his review of J. R. Ackerley's The Man Who Fell in Love With His...