Conference Presentations by Zosia Kuczynska
The influence of George Steiner’s In Bluebeard’s Castle (1971) on Brian Friel’s Translations (198... more The influence of George Steiner’s In Bluebeard’s Castle (1971) on Brian Friel’s Translations (1980) is routinely overshadowed by the critical attention given to the influence of Steiner’s After Babel (1975) on the same play. In this paper, I showcase Friel’s engagement with In Bluebeard’s Castle and the way in which he combines Steiner’s observations on a ‘classic’ culture, a ‘primitive’ society, and a ‘post-culture’ to suggest that two paradoxical axiomatic truths underpin and undermine any attempt at communality in times of social upheaval: that the transcendence-values (that is to say sense of endurance and of the future) of a cultural identity are rooted in language, and that the counters of language are prone to lexical fossilisation. I examine the way in which Friel incorporates two of the central conflicts of In Bluebeard’s Castle into Translations. The first of these conflicts is between the macro level of the classic cultures of Western civilisation and the micro level of community; the second is between the ‘dur désir de durer’ of cultures whose transcendence values are rooted in language and the ‘readiness not to endure’ of Steiner’s ‘post-culture’. Ultimately I suggest that the conflicts at work in Translations are less a conflict between nations than between contrasting definitions of culture itself at a time of collective identity crisis and imminent change. Thus Translations emerges as a play caught at a crossroads between cultures: between cultures of progress and cultures of stasis; between cultures of expectation and cultures of memory; and, above all, between cultures of the pre-eminence of the public word that transcends human mortality and cultures of the pre-eminence of the private image which must be renewed in order to combat the mortality of language.
Papers by Zosia Kuczynska
Irish University Review, 2020
The Brian Friel Papers at the NLI reveal a long and relatively unexplored history of major and mi... more The Brian Friel Papers at the NLI reveal a long and relatively unexplored history of major and minor influences on Friel's plays. As the archive attests, these influences manifest themselves in ways that range from the superficial to the deeply structural. In this article, I draw on original archival research into the composition process of Friel's genre-defining play Faith Healer (1979) to bring to light a model of influence that operates at the level of artistic practice. Specifically, I examine the extent to which Friel's officially unacknowledged encounter with a book of interviews with painter Francis Bacon influenced the play in terms of character, language, and form. I suggest that Bacon's creative process – incorporating his ideas on the role of the artist, the workings of chance, and the extent to which art does violence to fact – may have had a major influence on both the play's development and on Friel's development as an artist.
Editing by Zosia Kuczynska
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Conference Presentations by Zosia Kuczynska
Papers by Zosia Kuczynska
Editing by Zosia Kuczynska