Darkness Visible. Insight and Visual Impairment in Brian Friel’s The Enemy Within

Abstract

Considering the development of Brian Friel’s plays since the mid- 60s, one looks back at his first successful play The Enemy Within (1962) with fascination. In retrospection the play is seminal work as it develops the themes of exile, quest, displacement, nostalgia and memory that mark his later production. The Enemy Within is Friel’s first investigation into darkness, as it deals with the prototype of a split character, St. Columba, and the obscurities and shades of a psychic division later expressed in Public/Private Gar in Philadelphia. The purpose of this article is to draw attention to elements of darkness in Friel’s oeuvre and to the unifying motifs of darkness and blindness in The Enemy Within, which characterize the play and make it interesting per se. In fact, in spite of a certain naiveté in structure, The Enemy Within is built around a compact imagery based on polarities and parallelisms, in which darkness, disease and decay are counterbalanced by maybe too overt hints to light, resurrection and rebirth, thus highlighting a variety of “enemies within” to be fathomed and faced.