Re-Visioning History through Memory in Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa

Brian Friel (1929-2015) is an Irish prominent short story writer and playwright. Friel’s work spans almost fifty years and his reputation expanded well beyond Ireland. Dancing at Lughnasa (1990) is one of Friel’s outstanding memory plays. Named after Lugh, Lughnasa is the pagan ritual of the Celtic harvest festival in the Irish folk history. In Dancing at Lughnasa, Friel, through narrative memory, records a sequence of historical events and their impact on his vivid characters. Instead of setting his play in the 1990 present, Friel sets it in the 1930s, and traces the socio-economic conditions as well as the historical sequence in Eamon de Valera’s Free State.
From a postmodernist perspective, history, like memory, is subjective.  In Tropics of Discourse (1978), Hayden White, a postmodernist American historiographer, states “historical narratives, considered purely as verbal artifacts, can be characterized by the mode of figurative discourse in which they are cast” (94).  According to White, a historian can “emplot” historical events and mold them in a fictional   shape.  By “emplotment” he means “the encodation  of the facts contained in the chronicle as components of specific kinds of plot structures” (Tropics 83). Therefore, historical chronicles can be treated as fictional narratives which means that they are subject to analysis and interpretation and most importantly, like memory, to the view point of the narrator or interpreter.
The main goal of this paper is to examine how in Dancing at Lughnasa, according to White’s theory, Friel deals with history as if it were a fluid private memory depending more on imagination and fictional incidents than on factual ones. In his memory play, Friel attempts to give an explicit re-vision of history, to transform it into a sequence of narrative events and to show their impact on the lives of his characters.