In Between History and Historiography: Hybrid Identity and the Discourse of the Nation in Brian Friel’s Making History

Abstract

In this paper, I propose to see Making History as a play which, in the course of dissecting the conflicting views of history that have had divisive and alienating effects on the Irish people in both the south and the north, ultimately rejects the self-claim of historiography to our access to the past. Another important thematic feature of the play centers on the hybridized nature of Irish identity and how it comes to be suppressed and homogenized by the discourse of the nation. The discourse of the nation, however, is never pure or fully successful in self-purification and, as Making History shows, the Irish national discourse is itself a contingent product of the hybridization between Roman Catholicism, which was set against England’s Protestantism, and Irish tribalism that was mobilized for colonial struggle against England’s imperialism. In dramatizing how the discourse of the nation first came to fragment the hybrid identity of Irish people, then select some fragments and finally construct the single unified Irish identity, Friel ultimately turns against historiography and moves toward the dramatization of personal memory as the site of his dramatic inquiry. Making History, in short, is a play about “unmaking” history, a play that turns against history, or History, in search of the time and space for exploring the possibility of the relationship between the subjects of non-homogenized, unfixed and always negotiable identities.

Key Words Brian Friel, Making History, O’Neill, Hybrid Identity, The Discourse of the Nation, Historiography