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The stiff and unbending is the disciple of death.
The gentle and yielding is the disciple of life.
- Too te Ching
INTERPRETATIONS of Brian Friel's Dancing at Lughnasa tend to diverge in their understanding of the function of memory in the play. It is generally observed that Lughnasa stands in the tradition of memory theater epitomized by Tennessee Williams's The Glass Menagerie, but there are various accounts of Friel's purposes in utilizing the genre. Commentator David Krause criticizes the play for being "(a re-creation of) the aura of an idyllic past, an indulgence in nostalgia that... do(es) not lead to a very complex or profound experience" (372). For Krause, the summer days of 1936, when the narrator, Michael Mundy, was seven and especially, the wild circle dance of his mother and her four sisters one moonlit evening, form the basis of a reverie that eases the hardships of the adult Michael's everyday life. Krause complains that the audience is meant simply to "float along with Michael's sentimental reverie" (372).
More appreciative of the dramatic element of the play is Prapassaree Kramer, who insists that reading Lughnasa as an exercise in nostalgia makes the narrator's role too passive. On her account, Michael is engaged in a reconstruction of his childhood experiences as a way of expiating the guilt he feels for having abandoned his mother and aunts as soon as he came of age. Kramer's interpretation leans heavily on two aspects of the play which she seems to misread. The first is the fact that Michael (unlike Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie) does not play the role of his childhood self in the events portrayed, but rather, delivers the boy's lines from the narrator's position downstage left. Kramer maintains that this produces a "powerful distancing effect," which emphasizes Michael's "authorial)" control of characters and events (171). It seems more plausible to argue, however, that the "invisible child" (171) created by Friel's stage directions, simply highlights the nature of memory to be subjective in a way that looking at photographs of an event is not. Awareness of self is what we have with memory (just as with everyday experience), but never the perception of self as object.
The second piece of evidence given by Kramer...