ABSTRACT
Pine’s book is divided into three sections, ‘Private conversation’, ‘Public address’ and ‘Politics’, and much of what is wrong with his methodology can be gauged from the arbitrary way in which the text is parcelled out. The politics of private and public address, the dialectic between the two, is ignored or overlooked. Instead we are left with an unsatisfying polarization. Pine is not unaware of the problems implicit in his neat compartmentalization, and he asks in the ‘Introduction’ ‘Are these “privacies”…anything more than ghosts within our public personae?’ (p. 3). This initial display of doubt does not exorcise these ghosts, nor does it deter Pine from constructing his text in a way that deprives Friel, a writer who transgresses and traverses such metaphysical divisions as public and private, of some of his sophistication. Pine commits acts of privacy and piracy which come back to haunt him at the end of the book.
