Divided Ireland: Bifocal Vision in Modern Irish Drama by Ronald Gene Rollins (review)

Book Reviews 435 Friel regarded Philadelphia and its immediate successors, The Loves ofCassMaguire (1966), Lovers (1967) and Crystal and Fox (1968), as "attempts at analysing different kinds of love". Dantanus finds in all four "a sad awareness of the precariousness of individual life and love, the inevitable passing of time and the arbitrary workings of Fate" (p. 131). Lovers comprises two short plays, "Winners" and "Losers": the fonner, "tragic in conception, fragile and poetic in style"; the latter, "a bold farce with tragic undercurrents"; in both. "the prevalent mode of writing is ironic" (p. 134). In its approaching the same subject from different directions, Lovers is typical ofFriel's craft. Earlier, Dantanus, noting that the predominantly serious Translations (1980) is soon qualified by the farcical absurdity of The Communicatioll Cord (1982), had suggested, "There are no simple solutions or conclusions in Friel's work. Each statement automatically pennits its own opposite" (p. 44). This and similar observations, all well documented, may prompt one to recall Larry Slade's lines from O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh: "I was born condemned to be one of those who has to see all sides ofa question ... the questions multiply for you until in the end it's all question and no answer," Dantanus sees in The Freedom a/the City (1973) the beginning ofa new dimension in Friel's drama. After the events of Bloody Sunday in Derry - Friel himself took part in the ill-fated march - "contemporary reality forcibly entered his work; he could no longer refuse to deal with it" (p. 210) . But the "contemporary reality", Friel soon divined, might best be approached by means of historical perspectives; hence the "backward look" of Volunteers (1975), Aristrocrats (1979) and Translations (1980). Concurrently, Friel's ubiquitous theme ofcommunication expands from concern about communication between individuals to "the role of language as a reflection of national and racial qualities" (p. 172). In the early nineteenth-century setting of Translations, when the gruff English Captain Lancey expresses surprise that the local Irish do not speak English, the hedge-schoolmaster, Hugh, explains that a few of them do, on occasion, "usually for the purposes of commerce", a use for which the English tongue seems "particularly suited". English, Hugh suggests to the Captain, "couldn't rea1ly express us". Hugh later infonns the more sympathetic English Lieutenant Yolland that Irish is "a rich language, ... full of the mythologies of fancy and hope and self-deception - a syntax opulent with tomorrows. It is our response to mud-cabins and a diet of potatoes; our only method of replying to . .. inevitabilities". Not the easiest of books to review, this impressive work by Dantanus. It starts a goodly number of hares, most of them worth pursuing but some that prove difficult to track through the thickets of subsequent concerns. (The absence of an index hardly helps.) Does Dantanus attempt too much at oQce? Are the East-West, North-South dichotomies worth the juggling to keep them airborne throughout, or does this device distract somewhat from his enlightening commentary on individual plays? These are by no means rhetorical questions. S.F. GALLAGHER, TRENT UNIVERSITY RONALD GENE ROLLINS. Divided Ireland: Bifocal Vision in Modern Irish Drama. Book Reviews Lanham, MD, and New York: Univer~ity Press of America 1985. Pp. xi, 104· $19.75; $6.75 (PB). The Preface to these six discrete essays - most published in Modem Drama, the Sean O'Casey Review or Eire-Ireland, others to appear (1985) in Eire-Ireland or the Canadian Journal ofIrish Studies - calls the volume a "collage", a "spectrum of sorts" or "a revolving viewer with six glass panels that enables interested individuals to look in upon the topography. texture and tumult ofa small nation struggling to know and define itself'. It later proclaims, "Deliberately disjointed, this book, hopefully, approaches the condition of' discordia concors' •providing glimpses ofcontinuity and duplication amid discontinuity and variation" , Readers who may be annoyed by "the absence of transitional bridges linking the chapters" are blithely invited to "exert themselves and build their own". The anticipatory refutation (ofrash reviewers?) is hardly necessary. There are some annoying things about this book, but they do not include the absence of transitional bridges. (Besides...