Brian Friel and the Scene of Writing: Reading Give Me Your Answer, Do!

Brian Friel and the Scene of Writing: Reading Give Me Your Answer, Do! MARIA GERMANOU Brian Friel's thoroughgoing concern with the nature of language has been attributed to several faclors: his need to investigate the means of his own art; his political and cultural investment in a language inextricably bound up with Ireland's colonial history; and the impact on his work of Martin Heidegger's and George Steiner's views on language.I In Friel's oeuvre, language is the field where all the practices that constitute the social totality and the self take place, so that narratives and discourses about ourselves and the world are constituted by language.' Within this context of Heideggerian linguistic epistemology, Friel focuses on a language that is inventive, unstable, and speculative in its relation to reality, a sense of language as a slippery, ambiguous, and polysemous signifying system fully investigated in another of Friel's principal sources, George Steiner's After Babel (1975). Written language specifically is always defined by virtue of its untrustworthiness in conveying the reality to which it refers, a situation that has led to the conclusion that in Friel's work, "[wJriting and failure go hand in hand" (O'Toole 206). The scripting of reality leaves a lot to be desired, since each act of writing leaves something that escapes writing. The "same" event is approached from different perspectives, constructing various contradictory, provisional, or interested narratives, a theme illustrated in several of Friel's plays, including Living Quarters (1977), The Aristocrats (1979), and Making History (1988). Within this context, Give Me Your Answer, Do! (1997) acquires special interest since it deals specifically with literary language, and so allows Friel to interrogate the art of writing.3 Tom Connolly, the fictional author in the play, a writer with a limited readership and hoatding a lot of unpublished material, has been unable to write for several yeats and faces severe financial problems in having to provide for his institutionalized daughter, Bridget. Living in a decaying manse at Ballybeg with his wife Daisy, Tom is tempted to sell his Modern Drama, 46:3 (Fall 2003) 470 Reading Give Me YOllr Answer, Do! 471 manuscripts to David Knight, an American literary agent, but finally rejects . the long-awaited offer. He renounces the commodification of his art and opts instead for the spiritual and artistic life he associates with his daughter's seclusion and inwardness. Throughout the play, Tom confronts the intricate and unstable nature of language, which is found wanting as a vehicle for transparent meaning. Central to Tom's understanding of language and creative writing has been his attempt to decipher the mystery of his daughter's silence and insanity, as depicted in two important moments in his life, a mystery he feels has escaped the doctors' logic. First, while writing his last two novels, Tom discovers that Bridget, the subject of the novels, remains unwritable. As he attempts to write about her, the meaning of his words continually exceeds his intentions, bringing about unpredictable effects and revealing a plurality of surprising semantic possibilities incompatible with conventional logic. Tom's alternative to such a treacherous language, his second important experience, the wish to attain a realm of signification without resorting to its resources, rebounds. As the essence of Bridget's silence, which supposedly embodies such a realm, signifies always and only when articulated in specific discourses, in the play there is a constant return to the world of representation and a socially constituted language as the only place where meaning is at once constructed and contested. Within this context, polysemy and elusiveness, the innate attributes of language, do not constitute a deficiency; instead, in the "pathologies of language "lie "the roots of its genius" (Steiner 246). Writing facilitates the shaping of alternative meanings, liberating the wor(l)d from its enslavement to a stable and single truth, not only opening a space for poetic representation, but enabling the possibility of textual survival. Bridget's inability to generate meaning that is socially recognizable has made her liable to the (mis)interpretations that incapacitate her. Medical science , understanding insanity as mental illness, apprehends madness as a disorder to be redressed through a process...