Brian Friel's Short Fiction: Place, Community, and Modernity

This essay argues for the necessity of a critical reconsideration of Brian Friel's short fiction both because of its own merits and since its depiction of emplaced communities struggling with aspects of modernity anticipates such conflicts in the major plays. Although Friel does not believe that rural culture was ever pristine and unadulterated, he nonetheless hints how modernity's advent into his chosen milieu of northwestern Ireland/Northern Ireland can create problems among its inhabitants such as destruction of community. ‘The Diviner’ and ‘The Saucer of Larks’ valorize the organic epistemology practiced by inhabitants who are outsiders to a local culture but become more in tune with local rhythms and landscape — the flux of place identified by phenomenologist Edward Casey — than many of the original inhabitants. In some situations, such as those he explores in short stories such as ‘Kelly's Hall’ and ‘Among the Ruins’, he offers positive portrayals of mechanized culture's ability to unify communities when that new technology is properly controlled, while in others, such as ‘Foundry House’, ‘The Potato Gatherers’, and ‘Everything Neat and Tidy’, he shows the debilitating effects of technology.