Towards Communion: Encountering a Life in Brian Friel's "Faith Healer"

Brian Friel’s Faith Healer makes a problem of connection. It does not merely ‘represent’ the problem of connection for our contemplation: it stages it, and implicates us in it, undermining the very ground of our contemplation. For not only do the play’s three characters, across their extended monologues, describe their fraught relationships with one another, but their accounts of their supposedly shared life diverge from each other wildly. Coupled with the absence of any dialogue or neutral viewpoint, this disables any interpretative attempt to determine, non-arbitrarily, the connection between its characters’ statements and ‘what’ they represent. Interpreters of Faith Healer have attempted to solve this problem in two principal ways: by seeking to uncover ‘what’ the characters represent, or by seeking to determine the internal structures of their representations. But without any glimpse at ‘what’ the characters represent, both rest ultimately upon arbitrary assumptions. Abandoning this untenable assumption of fundamental mimeticism, this project seeks not to solve the problem of Faith Healer’s non-coherence, but to affirm it. It argues that the three characters’ determinations are not representations needing interpretative judgement, but creative expressions of the three lives that take place in the present of the reading/viewing encounter. The aim, here, is not to ‘make sense’ of the text as a whole, but to affirmatively engage the present sense-making of these different lives with trust and rigour. Chapter 1 of this project works through the critical literature, laying down the conditions for such an affirmative encounter. Chapter 2 articulates the basic concepts that the text creates, while chapters 3 through 5 seek to explore the complex and dynamic systems of living of each its characters. Chapter 6, exploring the repetitions that proliferate between the monologues, argues that Faith Healer is a work that is without overall unity, but composed of an intricate network of local connections created in the reading/viewing encounter.