The identity of people with their place is instinctive, traditional and deep-rooted"[1].

With these words Deirdre Flanagan describes the intense relationship between man and the landscape. Since our birth, we develop an intimate and ancestral bond with our place as fundamental element to the shaping of our own identity. But it is indeed a reciprocal relationship, insofar as place does not exists per se, but it becomes such only when we extract it out of undifferentiated spaces endowing it with a particular meaning for, and by, human sociability and identity. In other words, place defines us and we define place.

This deep relationship is referred to as the ‘sense of place', which Seamus Heaney defines as the interaction between the geographical landscape and the landscape of the mind[2]. The sense of place implies both the objective physical space and place-identity, that is the memories, conceptions, interpretations, feelings and ideas related to a specific place.

The value of place as element of self-definition and of cultural-identity is typical of every human being and society. And narration as a means to preserve places is a shared cultural operation.

But, as Heaney himself suggests, in the Irish culture it has been dealt more with place because of the particular situation of fracture Ireland has experienced in its history. For Ireland place is a matter of identity more than elsewhere, firstly because of its internal division between North and South which assumes also a political and religious meaning, secondly because the "possession of the land and possession of different languages have rendered the question particularly urgent"[3].

Indeed, Irish literature has developed a real geographical vocation since its origins. This sensibility to place can be traced back to the early phases of literature written in the Irish language, where the geographical space had a strong cultural dimension: history was mythical and myth was geographical. The literary genre of Dindshenchas (Lore of prominent places) of early and medieval Irish literature clearly demonstrates such keenness to the geographical dimension, and its influences throughout the whole course of the literary history from Yeats to Montague underline the urgency Heaney refers to.

Interesting literary and ideological interpretations of such urgency to deal with place can be found in the works of two main Irish authors: Sean O'Faolain and Brian Friel. Belonging to two different generations, both authors deal with the ‘sense of place' just in the terms suggested by Heaney. They both reveal the same attitude towards place: obsessed by the necessity to escape from Ireland, they anxiously fear the danger of departing from her. Landscapes and cherished spots characterise their writings and both interpret place in terms of cultural identity. But their attempts to define ‘Irishness' in terms of relation to the Irish ground are quite different.

Sean O'Faolain's personal experience with place has as a starting point a deep sense of rootedness in Gaelic Ireland. Born in Cork, the young O'Faolain feels trapped within the dullness and paralysis of urban life, soon substituted by the intense, passionate outburst of nationalism fostered by the 1916 Easter Rising. As a result of a renewed interest in the Irish native culture and traditions, he cultivated his Irish along with his nationalistic enthusiasm in West Co. Cork, later becoming an active revolutionary in the Irish Volunteers and in the IRA But the faith in the Republican cause was to be undermined by the dreadful Civil War and the disappointing 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty.

O'Faolain saw the provincial mentality dominating Ireland as a threat to his intellectual activity, therefore departing from his native country was the only possible way to safeguard it.

In his works he clearly points out such limitation of the Irish cultural environment, providing literary examples far from the idyllic interpretation of the Celtic Revivalists. Ireland was no longer identified with its rurality as authentic source and aesthetic value of ‘true Irishness', but it was indeed urban and paralysed, to say it with James Joyce. And it is definitely Joycean O'Faolain's vision of Ireland and therefore of ‘Irishness'. He advocated a regeneration and maintenance of the national tradition without the danger of fossilisation. This meant that it was necessary to become part of the modern world without forgetting one's roots. As previously expressed by Joyce, O'Faolain too calls for the necessity to use the English language to enter the world of modern literature. His revisionist attitude was mostly expressed in his periodical ‘The Bell', which attracted Ireland's best intellectual voices, from the social to the political, developing a common interest in denouncing the failure of De Valera's "dreary Eden". Revisionism meant to deny that ‘Irishness' was exclusively Gaelic, rural and Catholic, and to call into question external inheritances such as the English, the Protestant and the urban realities. Hence O'Faolain's admiration for a political leader such as Daniel O'Connell, who had broken with the old world of Gaeldom on the wake of the motto: "There is another world outside". O'Faolain's eagerness to find out that world outside Ireland and to become part of it openly sets internationalism in opposition to nationalism, as the only possible way for the future of his country.

Place is therefore a crucial issue insofar as the question of identity revolves around it. O'Faolain had understood that the only way to remain faithful to Ireland was to observe it from an outside perspective. His ‘voluntary exile' gave him the right detachment to balance emotion and reason, romance and realism, attachment and refusal. But the experience of exile was to be followed by the brave commitment to come back and stay. In this way Ireland had to be his home and the subject of his creative work, his whole life a total devotion to the regeneration of the concept of ‘Irishness' within the European context.

Friel's commitment to place is particularly intense, especially if one considers his personal geographical experience. Born in Co. Tyrone, he was intimately connected with two different places: Derry, his father's hometown, and Glenties, his mother's home place in south-west Co. Donegal. The two places together symbolically blend into a hybrid representing both Northern Ireland and the Republic, to become the imaginary locus of Friel's fiction: Ballybeg.

Friel's treatment of place is an intimate retreating into the local dimension, in a spirit evoking Kavanagh's parochialism, as a simple evocation of a particularly loved place, whose spiritual condition bear universal values. Both Kavanagh and Friel denounce Ireland's failure to provide its people with spiritual and intellectual freedom, concentrating on an internal perspective which, however, extends beyond the locale itself insofar as parochial becomes universal. Ballybeg, ‘Baile Beag' in Irish, is in fact, not only a ‘small town', but also meaningfully a ‘small home' (Baile in Irish means both ‘town' and ‘home'). In this simple detail of an imaginary place-name, Friel fully displays his ability to connect the ‘small place' with the whole world, thinking of the ‘small place' in terms of symbolic locus where essentially universal truths are revealed. Moreover, this ‘universality' assumes an even stronger meaning if we consider that Ballybeg is an imaginary place cut out from the Republic and Northern Ireland, a territorial metaphor whose story is symbolically true beyond any border.

Friel understands place in terms of displacement, meaning homecoming and leavetaking, with strong implications of loyalty and betrayal. But although these seem to cause much the same inner conflict experienced by O'Faolain, in Friel's case it assumes almost a tragic dimension. In his works, especially The Enemy Within, Translations and The Faith Healer, the relationship with the place of origin, with one's túath, is felt as painful and dominated by a sense of betrayal. Friel himself in his Self-Portrait admits that the definition of ‘Irishness' is much more problematic for his generation than for O'Faolain's. This complicated relationship with ‘Irishness' seems so extreme that he comes to the point of denying the very concept of home. The idea of home is ‘impossible' for Friel in the sense that the constant leavetakings and homecomings threaten its integrity and create a permanent condition of transitus[4]. For Friel it is impossible to stay outside the sacred circle of home without feeling the irresistible pull of the tribal centre, and consequently not to feel guilty for having abandoned it.

This might be the reason why place in Friel's works is evoked rather than lived. In Translations and Faith Healer, as in The Enemy Within, place is evoked through a poetical, spiritual necessity, to the extent of becoming pure sound. In O'Faolain's fiction, on the contrary, place comes spontaneously in the narration, it is in-between the characters' lives. It is as if in O'Faolain's works place had no need to be evoked insofar as it is fully lived and experienced. In A Summer in Italy and South to Sicily Ireland is not explicitly evoked, but one could say, it ‘evokes itself' through its many images in-between the foreign landscape.

Throughout his life O'Faolain has tried to find models beyond the local, not to desert his background, but to enhance it. He worked to bring the parochial into the mainstream of modern culture, to separate the concept of ‘Irishness' from that of ‘Gaeldom'. Those who believed that to be Irish was to be Gaelic, Catholic and rural, did not admit to belong to Europe and kept concentrating on the past. To be cosmopolitan meant to emancipate oneself from this isolating fondness of the past and to live the Here and Now so passionately pursued by O'Faolain.

Both Friel's experience with Field Day and O'Faolain's ‘The Bell' share this attempt to revise the Irish identity in relation to its ground. However, Friel's research lacks that cosmopolitan outlook which was the cornerstone of O'Faolain's writing. The Field Day attempt to redefine the Irish identity was more concerned with the internal fractures of Ireland, its being Catholic and Protestant, English and Irish, Unionist and Republican and so on. The fact that Field Day was conceived as ‘fifth province of the mind'[5] highlights the local character of such investigation.

On the other hand, O'Faolain's search for a renewed ‘Irishness' was more focused on the outer resources which Ireland could draw on, opening itself to Europe and to the world.

Both authors display the same attitude towards place as the central core around which the social, political, psychological and material experience of man revolves. But they had different approaches to the question - Friel through an inward eye, O'Faolain through an outward one. In this sense Friel's ‘parochialism', in accordance with Kavanagh, does not mean a limited acceptance of one's identity, but a research undertaken within the local, whereas O'Faolain's cosmopolitanism projects this research beyond it.

Notes

[1] Deidre Flanagan, "Place-names: A matter of Identity" in Bulletin of the Ulster Place-Name Society 1981-2, 2.

[2] "Irrespective of our creed or politics, irrespective of what culture or subculture may have coloured our individual sensibilities, our imaginations assent to the stimulus of the names, our sense of the place is enhanced, our sense of ourselves as inhabitants not just of a geographical country, but of a country of the mind is cemented. It is this feeling, assenting, equable marriage between the geographical country and the country of the mind [...] that constitutes the sense of place in its richest possible manifestation." Heaney 1980, 132.

[3] Ibid. 136.

[4] Pine 1999, 30.

[5] The Oxford Companion to Irish Literature, 187.

Bibliography

Andrews Elmer, The Art of Brian Friel, Houndmills Basingstoke: Mac Millan, 1995.

Bonaccorso Richard, Séan O'Faolain's Irish Vision, State of University of New York Press, 1987.

Butler Hubert, " The Bell: An Anglo-Irish View" in Irish University Review, Special Issue, Spring 1976.

Flanagan Deirdre, "Place-names: A matter of identity" Bulletin of the Ulster Place Name Society vol. I, 1978: 1-3.

Friel Brian, Faith Healer, in Plays, Faber & Faber, London.

Friel Brian, The Enemy Within, Gallery Press, Loughscrew, 1992.

Friel Brian, Translations, in Plays, Faber & Faber, London.

Friel Brian, Philadelphia here I come!, Faber & Faber, London, 1965.

Graham Brian editor, In Search of Ireland, Routledge, London, 1998.

Harmon Maurice, Sean O'Faolain, Wolfhound Press, 1984.

Heaney Seamus, Preoccupations: selected prose 1968-1978, Faber & Faber, London, 1980.

Heaney Seamus, The place of writings, Atlanta Scholar Press, 1989.

Kavanagh Patrick, The Complete Poems, N.Y., 1972.

Lee Joseph editor, Ireland: towards a sense of place, University College Cork-R.T.E. lectures, Cork University Press, 1985.

Lovell Nadia, Locality and belonging, Routledge, London, 1998.

Massey Doreen, A Place in the world? Places, cultures and globalisation, Mac Millan, London, 1989.

Mc Cartney Donal, "Sean O'Faolain: A Nationalist Right Enough" in Irish Univeristy Press, Special Issue, Spring 1976.

Mc Mahon Sean editor, Great Irish Writing: The Best from the Bell, O'Brian, 1983.

Nicolaisen W.F.H. "The world of names" in Ainm vol. VII, Belfast, 1996-7: 28-43.

O'Connor Patrick, Living in a coded land, Appletree Press, Belfast, 1993.

Ó Cuív Brian, "Dinnshenchas- the literary exploitation of Irish place-names" in Ainm vol. IV, Belfast, 1989-90: 90-106.

O'Faolain Sean, "A Portrait of the Artist as an old Man" in Irish University Review, Special Issue, Spring 1976.

O'Faolain Sean, A Summer in Italy, Eyre & Spottiswoode, London, 1949.

O'Faolain Sean, Come Back to Erin, Greenwood Press, Wesport 1972.

O'Faolain Sean, South to Sicily, Collins, London, 1953.

O'Faolain Sean, "The Gaelic Cult" in The Bell, vol.9, no. 3, Dec. 1944 in Field Day Anthology of Irish Writings vol. III, S. Deane editor, Faber & Faber, Belfast, 1991.

O'Faolain Sean, Vive Moi!, Sinclair-Stevenson, 1993.

O' Flanagan Patrick, The living landscape, Comhairle Bhéaloideas Éireann, Dublin, 1975.

Pine Richard, The Diviner: the art of Brian Friel, U.C.D. Press, 1999.

Rydern Kent, Mapping the invisible landscape, University of Iowa Press, Belfast, 1993.

Sheeran Patrick." Genius Fabulae: The Irish Sense of Place". Irish University Review, Autumn 1988: 191-206.

Shepard Paul, Man in the landscape, Texas A & M University Press, 1991.

Smith Elsdon, "The significance of name study" in Proceedings of the Eighth International Congress of Onomastic Sciences, D. P. Block editor, Amsterdam, 1968.

Taylor Isaac, Words and Places, Mac Millan & Co., London, 1864.

Taylor Samuel editor, The uses of place-names, Scottish Cultural Press, Edinburgh, 1998.

Welch Robert editor, Oxford Companion to Irish Literature, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1996.