MAKING HISTORY.

Abstract

This paper examines both Brian Friel's historical discussion about making history and his own process of making history in Making History to see how his historical drama enacts issues addressed by Linda Hutcheon - topics such as the blurring of history and fiction and the questioning of metanarratives. While Friel acknowledges that history is always a fiction, he is also committed to the project of recording historical facts in another tune. Friel's self-conscious use of such double historical activities enables him to make us question the grand narrative, as shown in Lombard's nationalist accounts of the life of Hugh O'Neill. Unlike Lombard, Friel makes the history of Hugh O'Neill as that of a divided figure, who sustains a delicate balance between supporting his fellow chieftains and a semblance of loyalty to the English Queen. It is ironical that while Friel sees himself as a postmodernist who deconstructs Lombard's nationalistic version of O'Neill, he also accepts Lombard's view that history is a narrative made by a historian-maker. Friel shares with Lombard many historical ideas, but the O'Neill biography Friel is writing in this play is similar to the biography O'Neill himself wants to be written, that is, the story of a contradictory man torn between the cultural values of Englishness and Irishness. Just as Friel's O'Neill finds himself divided between the local hostilities of Anglo-Irish relations and the wider prospects of European politics, so Friel posits himself in a carefully balanced dialectic between Lombard's theory and O'Neill's wish (to depict himself as a contradictory man). Friel's use of meta-historical dramatic technique enables him to exhibit a postmodern skepticism of historical narratives. But the play cannot simply be assimilated into the canon of postmodernism. Friel's love of life and instinctivedesire to understand one's inner mind, as represented in his depiction of O'Neill as a divided self, seem to weaken his unrelenting postmodern analysis, a radical demystification of history as a fiction.