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THE reality of doubt, fragmentation, and ambiguity characteristic of the postmodern world does not obviate the human desire for certainty and ultimate peace.1 It is this desire to explain the inexplicable which lies at the heart of Brian Friel's Faith Healer. Arguably his most poetic and impressive work, critical responses have ranged along a number of lines. It is at once a commentary about the artist and process of artistic creation - a production whose reliance on monologic structure and the shifting memories of its characters evokes Kurosawa's Rashomon and Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie - and a drama that poignantly enacts the possibility for transcendence which lies at the heart of aesthetic and religious experience.2
What interests me here is an inquiry into the elements of mysticism, spirituality, and mystery which haunt the play and more specifically, its central character, Francis Hardy. Several scholars have acknowledged the scriptural allusions woven throughout the four monologues (e.g., the wedding feast [John 2:1-11], the curing of the ten lepers [Luke 17:11-19], the prophet scorned in his homeland [Mark 6: 1-6]) and have identified Frank as a problematic, if not parodic, Christ figure driven to understand the nature and source of his ability to heal.3 The play's final monologue narrates Frank's return to Ireland along with Grace, his wife, and Teddy, his stage manager. There, the faith healer, whose only certitude about his gift lies in knowing "when nothing [is] going to happen" (334), meets his death at the hands of drunken, vengeful countrymen.
Is it possible, however, to read Faith Healer against a broader backdrop - one which embraces the mystical as central to the physical and spiritual livelihood of the individual and the community? Might we interpret Frank's climactic last words - "At long last I was renouncing chance" (376) - as something more than suicidal despair or the abdication of his gift? Drawing from Celtic and Christian traditions, I explore evidence of the sacred in the play as it is manifest within the lives of Hardy and to a lesser extent, Grace and Teddy. Next, I trace Frank's frustrated efforts to rationalize the source of his healing power and in so doing wield it with greater control. I argue that Frank Hardy's tortured struggle is...