In the opening act of The Playboy, Synge describes a people who only rise to intensity of feeling when they are recounting deeds of violence. Folk who once sat spellbound at the stories about Cuchulain now regale one another with tales of a more tedious sadism: of Daneen Sullivan who "knocked the eye from a peeler" and "the mad Mulrannies were driven from California and they lost in their wits".13
So obsessively are poetry and violence interwoven in the mental fabric of the Mayoites that the women seem incapable of describing poetry except in terms of violence, and unable to imagine violence except as a kind of poetry. To the comparatively reticent Christy of Act One Pegeen exclaims:
If you weren't destroyed travelling, you'd have as much talk and streeleen, I'm thinking, as Owen Roe O'Sullivan or the poets of the Dingle Bay...14
– and she mentions the eighteenth-century Gaelic poet Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin specifically, because his hot temper led to a tavern brawl and death from injuries received:
... I've heard all times it's the poets are your like – fine fiery fellows with great rages when their temper's roused.15
Later still, Pegeen returns to the equation of poetry with violence when she tells Christy that he is a grand fellow "with such poet's talking and such bravery of heart".16 The two notions are likewise coupled in her rejection of Shawn Keogh as "a middling kind of scarecrow with no savagery or fine words at all".17
At the end Christy has tamed his resurrected (and delighted) 'da' with the twin boast that he is "master of all fights" and will "go romancing through a romping lifetime".18 Like his creator, he still equates brutality and romance. It is left to Pegeen to dismantle the equation in the name of the Mayo villagers:
I'll say a strange man's a marvel, with his mighty talk; but what's a squabble in your backyard, and the blow of a loy, have taught me that there's a great gap between a gallous story and a dirty deed.19
If barbarism and culture are intimately linked, then it is the poetry rather than the brutality which impresses the Mayoites in the end. Synge's implication is that the besetting vice of the Irish may not have been pugnacity but paralysis. Pegeen's separation of gallous stories and dirty deeds is excessive. The space opened by her at the end between poetry and violence is, if anything, even more sinister than her earlier, absolutist identification of both. So, at the close, Mayo suffers the extreme colonial torpor described by Shaw: the facts seem more brutal than ever, the dreams even more unreal. Instead of closing with one another in a dancing dialectic, they move farther apart, leaving society unredeemed and apparently unredeemable. A revolution occurs, but it is happening offstage.
"Deeds are masculine, words feminine" says a proverb, as if to ratify Pegeen's separation: but The Playboy tells a more complex truth about how these categories interpenetrate one another. Its men commit most of the verbal violence onstage and are actually less aggressive in action, whereas the women, schooled to repress their instincts, are consumed by unappeased pugnacious impulses. There is violence in Pegeen, as in many persons, and it has not been assuaged by the gallous story: this becomes clear when she lights a sod of turf to cripple her former lover. This brutal act, deemed to be beyond belief by many of the play's first critics, is entirely in keeping with her character as revealed from the start. Emphasizing this scene, the original production underscored Synge's brilliant insight: that those who make rhetorical denials of their own violence invariably end up committing even more. In that sense, at least, the 1907 rioters finished the play for Synge with a demonstration of its central point. In all likelihood, that audience thrilled to the poeticized accounts of a distant violence in the opening acts, only to be nauseated by the deglamorized onstage repetition in the flesh: their revolt against the second murder may have arisen from a sudden onset of shame at how easily they themselves had accepted the first "killing". Like future Abbey producers, indeed like the Mayo villagers themselves, they repressed the violence in the text and subordinated it to the poetry, only to find the energies which they denied unleashed in some other form. Theirs was the dilemma of Pegeen Mike, whose aggression turned out to be an inextricable part of her vitality. To reject the "dirty deed" of Christy, she must also deny that element within herself, and yet, in following the dictates of polite society, something has been lost.
Synge was amused by the fact that the great deeds of a Cuchulain were typically applauded by men too timid to think of emulating them. In the Irish Ireland movement of his time, there were basically two schools of writing: one devoted to the heroic legends of Cuchulain and ancient heroes, the other to a vision of the western peasant as a secular saint and Gaelic mystic. By recreating some of the traits of the ancient hero in a puny peasant playboy, Synge offered his own caustic comment on the similarities and dissimilarities between the Irish past and present. His was a challenge to both schools, to concede, if they would, the savagery as well as the glamour at the heart of their cultural enterprise.20
If Synge's art were simply an analysis of the relation between barbarism and culture in Ireland, it would merit our respect: but it gains an added depth by serving also as an example of that relation. All culture is parasitic: what lives feeds off what dies and feeds without scruple. Synge's was in truth a carrion vision, but he was always critically aware of its costs: and this is what distinguishes him ultimately from a writer like Lady Gregory. She once remarked on the strange discrepancy between the poverty of peasant story-tellers and the splendour of their tales. She was beguiled and moved by the contrast, as are many people who note that the black man, in losing so many battles, was compensated by all the best songs: but she left her analysis in that unresolved sate, too pleased with the paradox, perhaps, to explore it further.
Synge was quite different. In his writings, he worried constantly about the gap between a beautiful culture and the poverty that can underlie it. In The Aran Islands, for instance, he notes how every piece of furniture, every chair, every table, has a personality of its own, lovingly imparted to it by its maker, albeit at immense cost in terms of time, trouble, pain – so great a cost, indeed, that the maker often seems to have been robbed of his identity in the very making, as his self passed into his production. One critic has astutely observed that the islanders are depicted by Synge as persons obsessed with the price of everything.21 This is because they are people who can scarcely afford an individuality. In Riders to the Sea a drowned man is identified not only by his bruised and broken body, which even his mother would be "hard put" to recognize, but by a dropped stitch in his stocking, a mere object. The few traces of personality shown by his mother, her self-absorption in grief, are massive liabilities, almost criminal acts of self-indulgence, within the subsistence economy of the islands. Her final speeches of compassion, spoken as "an old woman" on behalf of all mothers left living in the world, represent a triumph over that selfishness, a return to folkloristic impersonality. Synge records all this with a terrified and terrifying accuracy, because he knows that, however spare and beautiful such a culture may seem to the outsider, its costs in human terms are just too high.
So he checks his own tendency to be charmed by the well-wrought stool or the beautifully-hewn table. Turning his back on William Morris and the folk radicalism of his youth, he reminds himself of a harder socialist school, and honestly concedes that all these beautiful effects are bound up with a social condition near to penury. He knows that that condition cannot last and so it has, therefore, the added charm of an exquisite, dying thing: and he does not finally oppose the change. He is sufficiently self-aware to admit that his very presence on the islands is a portent of that change. Though beguiled by much of the backwardness, he is an agent of that change, bringing the first alarm-clock to the islands (with the attendant notion of clock-time, efficiency and measurement) as well as his camera (itself creating a new narcissism among the islanders, which he observes with some disgust, since the camera was a curiosity employed by him to win the confidence and respect of the people). Seeing his photographs of them, the is
landers tell Synge that they are seeing themselves for the first time.
Synge knows that he is only an interloper on Aran, a tourist, one of the first and, perhaps one day, one of the most famous among many: and that the more successful is his book called The Aran Islands, the more extreme will be the consequent disruptions of tradition by the day-trippers who will come in his wake. Indeed he has – though he never quite says this – a vested interest in those disruptions, because after they have had their effect, his book will be even more evocative than ever. He himself will feed off the death of the old Gaelic culture, as do all coroners and morticians. The covert desire of his book, to make the present past, is something that Synge shares with all his major creations, whether Maurya looking forward to the relative serenity of the long nights after Samhain, or Deirdre imagining how the story of her current exploits will be told forever. That is the only actual control which these women achieve over their lives. Otherwise, Deirdre is at the mercy of events, and Old Maurya is unable to bless a departing son because "something choked the words in my throat".22 Both are doomed to repeat lines already known by heart, so that the striking beauty of their language is in direct contrast with its ineffectuality. The so-called exoticism of Synge's language is related to the remoteness of his characters from the "big world" with its standardized versions of English. The greater that displacement, the more untamed the life and the more colourful its deviations from the linguistic norm. But the dislocation which makes these people colourful is also that which leaves them powerless.
The mortal charm of Synge's dialect is the beauty that inheres in all precarious or dying things. Much of it is traceable to the Gaelic substratum, those elements of syntax and imagery carried over from the native tradition by a people who continue to think in Irish even as they speak in English. The famous "jawbreakers" – words like "bedizened" or "potentate" – are in the tradition of hedge-schoolmasters nervously advertising their new mastery of English polysyllabic effects to impress the parents of their putative pupils, in the absence of a more formal diploma. The tradition was at least as old as Goldsmith's village schoolmaster:
While words of learned length and thundering sound
Amazed the gazing rustics ranged around;
And still they gazed and still the wonder grew,
That one small head could carry all he knew.23
The potency of Synge's idiom derived in great pan from the reported death of Irish; and the deader (or, at least, the more doomed) that language, the more vital the semantic energies that passed into Hiberno-English and the more magnificent that language seemed.
Hiberno-English, like Christy Mahon, owes its force to the apparent murder of its parent: and The Playboy of the Western World may thus be read as a critical reflection upon its own linguistic parasitism. The bleak joke, of course, is that standard English was itself rather jaded by cliché-mongers when Synge began to write. Synge saw that a deterritorialized Irish might yet deterritorialize English, leading to a bilingual weave more vital than either of the standard languages between which it stood. Yeats's crusades for a formal recognition of that dialect have been already discussed: against a "schoolmaster's ideal of correctness", which led to such clichés as "flagrant violations" and "shining examples", he pitted the dialect of country people, which was "an imitation of nothing English".24 The accusation against Synge's peasants came, he said, from those whose minds were full of sentimental Kickhamesque novels written to an English literary formula.
This demand for an official recognition of Hiberno-English went unanswered. Nationalist leaders could celebrate standard Irish as a countervailing discourse to standard English, but they could not embrace the new hybrid language, which Synge was magnifying in its carrier Christy. Most nationalist commentators preferred to treat Synge as an unapologetic ascendancy parasite, stocking up his tourist's notebook with self-serving studies in a dying culture. D. P. Moran dubbed the dialect a "hopeless half-way house", neither good Irish nor good English, but a sort of bastard lingo which grew in the no-man's land between two authentic cultures.25 More recently, Seamus Deane has added a subtler inflection to that analysis, describing Synge as one who creamed off the Gaelic culture in the few remaining areas where his class had failed to exterminate it, but where he could now appropriate its energies on the eve of their extinction.26
Such an analysis ignores Synge's critical awareness of the points which might be made against his own cultural project; and it slights the skill with which he infuses that awareness into his writings in the ways just described. Far from being a secret snob, Synge was a radical who grew up in an oppressed society, impressed by its cultural richness but even more horrified by its costs. The contention that the rioters against The Playboy were outraged by his ascendancy attitudes to peasant religion or rural psychology is in some measure a retrospective fabrication by nationalists, who convinced themselves that their objection was to snobbism. In 1907, it was the radical ideas in the play, as well as the accompanying violence, which did most to upset the nationalists, including the pre-revolutionary Pearse. Seamus Deane's critique of Synge, though not penned as such, is probably the most eloquent defence yet written of the Playboy rioters; and the strength of its arguments should remind us that those who disrupted the performance were no random collection of hotheads, but some of the most sensitive and intelligent thinkers of the time, risking arrest and imprisonment for the stand which they took. Nevertheless, Deane's reading of the play is mistaken, because it is based on revivalist productions and on a scholarly tradition which claimed Synge as one of Anglo-Ireland's crowning glories. (The major exponent of this interpretative tradition was T. R. Henn, who liked to portray Synge as a martyr to the Irish mob, perhaps because this assuaged his own guilt about ascendancy mistreatment of the natives.)
Synge was, by his own say-so, a radical, whom he defined as "someone who wanted to change things root and branch". He was a student of such texts as Marx's Das Kapital and Communist Manifesto, the works of William Morris, L'Anarchie, Problems of Poverty, Principes du Socialisme and Basic Socialism. He went to Paris in 1896 with the intention of immersing himself in the radical movement: "he wants to do good", lamented his mother, "and for that possibility he is giving up everything".27 This was no passing youthful fancy: for in the last days of his life, at the Elpis Nursing Home in Dublin, he repeatedly sought to engage the nurses on the topic of feminism. The protesters may have known exactly what they were doing. They were middle-class nationalists who did not want a revolution: and so they attacked and tried to stop his play as it moved into its liberationist third act. This process must now be explained.
When Christy leads his father out towards the end of that act, "like a gallant captain with his heathen slave",28 the pair constitute the image of a revolutionary community, while the villagers lapse into revivalism. In such a revolutionary community, the old take their cue from the young (rather than the other way round): so the stage directions emphasize Old Mahon's delight at this new assertiveness in his off-spring.
Earlier in the play, this positive revolutionary potential had been suggested by a masculinization of women and a corresponding feminization of men. These reversals constitute that political and sexual unconscious, systematically explored in the Irish writings of Wilde and Shaw, Joyce and Yeats: but it was Synge, more than any other, who dramatized that moment when "the person is born, assumes his autonomy, and becomes the creator of his own values".29 He seems to have believed that such reversals had always been possible to artists: for example, in suggesting to Molly Allgood that they write a play together, he proposed that he write the female parts and she the male. A revolution, however, would open such possibilities to all, on the anarchist principle that every man and woman could be an artist.
In The Playboy the women take the initiative in wooing; they enjoy the experience of trying on the hero's mud-spattered boots; and, generally, they disport themselves with a sort of locker-room bravado. The foremost among them, Pegeen, "would kn
ock the head of any two men in this place"30: while the men of the village do seem to score more modestly on any available virility-test. The women complain that the Widow Quins "sneaky" murder of her husband won "small glory with the boys itself",31 as if the boys are a lot more easily cowed than the girls. Moreover, the sexual chemistry of the play vindicates Freud's contention that manly women are attracted, and attractive, to womanly men. The phrase "female woman" is used by Old Mahon as if to indicate a pained, sexist awareness that there is another kind: the kind attracted by his son. It was the female women who, of course, made of Christy a "laughing joke", but what mesmerizes all of the women is his femininity. Pegeen praises his small aristocratic feet (as if he is a fetishized sex-object of her starved imagination); the village women enjoy his nuances of delicate phrasing ("That's a grand story... He tells it lovely")32; and the Widow Quin has fantasies of putting him into a woman's dress by way of securing his liberation from persecution.
Perhaps the most telling moment is that when the village women burst in upon the risen Christy of Act Two, only to find him preening himself in a mirror: "Didn't I know rightly, I was handsome, though it was the divil's own mirror we had beyond, would twist a squint across an angel's brow?"33 That was the cracked looking-glass of a servant, in fact: but now he knows the heady delights of a Caliban seeing his own face in a flawless mirror. The ensuing scene is Synge's mischievous repudiation of that sexist tradition, which encouraged male artists to paint nude females, into whose hands they put mirrors. Such paintings, though composed by some men for the delectation of others, purported to be high-minded commentaries on female narcissism: and, accordingly, the woman was rendered holding the mirror up to her face, or her breast, and the painting duly entitled "Vanity".34 In a boldly feminist reversal, Synge has an embarrassed Christy unwittingly mock the stereotype by hiding the mirror behind his back and holding it up against his bottom, to the vast amusement of village women who comment: "Them that kills their fathers is a vain lot surely".35
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