Degeneration, Eugenics, and The Playboy of the Western World

This chapter considers Synge’s controversial, riot-inducing masterpiece, The Playboy of the Western World (1907). Playboy, as a form of discursive retribution against certain restrictive politics, deploys a drama of sexual selection in a degenerated landscape in order to posit ironic humour, imaginative freedom, and ‘savage’ violence as a revitalizing impulse. Beginning with a curious phonetic letter sent to Synge by his friend, this chapter explores the themes of evolutionism, degeneration, and irony discussed in previous chapters, showing how Synge’s writing interacted with contemporary eugenicist discourses but posited the case for social and economic regeneration (rather than ‘race improvement’) as an antidote. Against this background, the chapter demonstrates that The Playboy is the apotheosis of Synge’s increasingly modernist, increasingly political, drama. For him, nationalist orthodoxies and certain forms of economic and social modernization were degenerative, and The Playboy purposefully acts as a sort of ironic protest against this. The chapter concludes by showing that writers such as W. B. Yeats, and later the playwright Teresa Deevy in her The King of Spain’s Daughter (1937), recognized Synge’s literary and political radicalism before he was effectively canonized as a cultivator of a Romantic cult of the peasant. Synge’s modernism, as The Playboy of the Western World shows most clearly, is simultaneously a form of political and literary protest. Rooted in his socialism and informed by his long-standing engagement with modernization, it is the apotheosis of his tendency towards a literary experiment which works in tandem with an ever-developing political, social, and aesthetic consciousness.

‘An Initiated Mystic’

Opening with an anecdote about Synge’s attempts at telepathy, and using much archival material, this chapter reveals Synge’s engagement with occultism, showing it to be not only pervasive but integral to his work. Although Synge as occultist has never been granted credence in studies of the writer, he read widely in occult literature, covering theosophy, magic, telepathy, and other pseudosciences. This reading coincided with Synge’s engagement with socialism, and the two interests were closely linked. Focusing principally on Synge’s major prose work The Aran Islands (1907), the chapter draws on numerous drafts, along with Synge’s ‘Autobiography’ and ‘Étude Morbide’, to show that Synge made recourse to occult mysticism in response to moments of fragmentation, where modernity becomes most pressing and disruptive. In this way, the first chapter introduces Synge as a mystical thinker and a leftist writer whose works were a nuanced and self-reflexive reaction to modernity. It also introduces the key methodology of the book as a whole, mobilizing Synge’s archives and reading diaries, and bringing to light new source materials in order to illuminate the processes of influence and authorial revision at work behind his texts. Using works by Madame Blavatsky, Maurice Maeterlinck, Annie Besant, William Morris, W. B. Yeats, Laurence Oliphant, and others, this chapter places Synge back into the context of fin de siècle occultism, and in doing so reveals the roots of his synthesis of mystic and political thought.

‘A Black Knot’

This chapter develops the tensions inherent in Synge’s early works towards an understanding of his formal innovation, asserting the ‘time pressure’ of his one-act plays as a dimension of his response to modernity. Synge’s drafts for various articles, particularly ‘The Old and New in Ireland’, and an article on social change in Wicklow, combine with his notes on Herbert Spencer and evolutionary theory to show a writer deeply conscious of modernization and literature’s responsiveness to modernity. Contributing to and drawing on new work on the spatial and temporal dimensions of modernism, this chapter shows that the structures and plots and Synge’s one-act plays Riders to the Sea and The Shadow of the Glen are rooted in a battle of temporalities. By comparing the timescales of Synge’s one-act plays to those of his Revivalist contemporaries, this chapter shows that his reading in sociology, philosophy, and evolutionary science, alongside his experiences in the modernizing ‘Congested Districts’ of Ireland, fundamentally affected his literary output. Fractured communal relations are figured as fractures in the time frames of the drama, and the overlapping of temporalities and levels of modernization find their correlatives in the constant and unresolved competition for dominance from any one conception of time. These plays, far from being isolated from the concerns of modernization, or from reverting to a solely romanticized vision of the peasantry, in fact register a sense of formal instability as a result of their fraught and multiple conceptions of time and space.

‘From the Congested Districts’

While travelling in the ‘Congested Districts’ of Mayo and Connemara with Jack Yeats in early summer 1905, on commission for The Manchester Guardian, Synge wrote a short vignette which he later added to the fourth part of his as-yet-unpublished prose narrative, The Aran Islands. The vignette in question takes the form of an inserted ‘set piece’ in which a crow is found trying to smash a golf ball. Here, the manuscript reveals the effects of the Guardian commission in confirming Synge’s oppositions to modernization in the west of Ireland and in prompting an increasing irony towards his earlier Romanticism. Taking this ‘set piece’ as its starting point, this chapter mobilizes Synge’s reading in socialism, and his correspondence and drafts for the Guardian commission, to demonstrate the writer’s socialist proclivities and to chart their nuances. Drawing on the earlier chapters of the book, this chapter shows that Synge’s socialism is rooted in nature and mystical experience, and in thought patterns borrowed from Spencerian evolutionism: he opposes modernization when it takes on a homogenizing form which he perceives as anti-nature. By showing that for Synge the aesthetic is politicized, and the political aestheticized, this chapter also registers a recalibrated Synge, evolving a more modernist response to his own notoriety. It concludes by positing the revision of his subsequent article, ‘The People of the Glens’, as a measure of an increasingly ironic sensibility, leading into the elaborate ironical, political structures of his final completed play, The Playboy of the Western World.

The Wicklow Essays

This chapter focuses on the essays Synge wrote and revised over a decade (1898–1908) during his travels in Wicklow. Beginning with a discussion of Synge’s engagement with natural history, and his simultaneous engagement with positivistic science and works on spiritualism and mysticism, the chapter firstly argues that Synge’s religious sense was pantheistic and worked to reconcile his belief in evolutionary science with a sense of the numinous. Drawing on ecocritical scholarship, the chapter reads Synge’s essays alongside his contemporary reading of evolutionary theorists such as Henry Drummond, T. H. Huxley, and Darwin, and writers who applied evolutionary thought to anthropology and sociology, such as James Frazer and Herbert Spencer. By showing that Synge worked to ‘re-enchant’ nature, emphasizing close connection with the physical world as the principal source of spiritual experience, and by placing this alongside the occult knowledge explored in the previous chapter, Chapter 2 shows that Synge’s view of nature is essentially mystical. Synge’s contribution to little magazines is used to trace the development of his work, showing how the illustrations chosen for his article ‘The Last Fortress of the Celt’ work to compound Synge’s presentation of the Irish peasant as a member of the global primitive. Finally, this is shown to have a socialistic dimension through Synge’s writings about forms of labour, in which the vagrant figure, through the rejection of the unequal exchange of time and capital, is freed into a sort of religious state which Synge then associates with the opposition between ‘vigorous’ and Decadent art.

Conclusion

Returning to Synge’s first completed play, the Conclusion shows that despite its clunky construction and heavy-handed didacticism, When the Moon Has Set (1900–3) contains the kernels of many of the concerns traced throughout this book. When the Moon Has Set illustrates Synge’s basic values before they were politicized, and thus acts in this Conclusion as an apt comparison by which to judge the increasing modernism of Synge’s work after his pantheism, mysticism, and socialism were mobilized and ironized by the Revival and its concomitant pressures. Touching on Synge’s final uncompleted play, Deirdre of the Sorrows, the conclusion suggests that the trajectory traced in this book does not find a satisfactory conclusion in this work, which Synge himself admitted might be too removed from real social and political concerns to be successful. It was, for him, both his final play and a new departure, and suffered from the pressure of the adverse reaction to The Playboy of the Western World. Finally, by tracing the afterlives of Synge in writers such as W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, Djuna Barnes, and Flann O’Brien, the book closes by suggesting the new ways in which our understanding of modernism and Revivalism (and the relationship between the two) can be reconfigured in the light of Synge’s work, positing Synge not only as an early leftist modernist but also as a writer of radical literary and political potential.

Introduction

The introduction outlines Synge’s main aesthetic, philosophical and spiritual values, drawing on archival material and early texts to emphasise the importance of a connection to, and harmony with, nature. Guiding the reader through the critical heritage on Synge, and the emergence of a political Synge in criticism, it also explores the culture of the Irish Revival in relationship to modernity. It also outlines key themes for the book: Synge’s engagement with mysticism, socialism, modernisation, Irish nationalism and European literature. The introduction positions Synge as a writer who was a Romantic in temperament, but a modernist in practice.

Dialectics, Irony, and The Well of the Saints

Beginning with a reading of a short manuscript fragment, A Rabelaisian Rhapsody (1898–1900), this chapter shows that this short dramatic dialogue affords us a unique and overlooked insight into the structures and key concerns of Synge’s entire dramatic oeuvre. In doing so, the chapter excavates many new influences on Synge’s work through a close reading of new source materials by Jacob Boehme, Spinoza, Blavatsky, Nietzsche, Hegel, Rabelais, Paracelsus, and a number of esoteric figures, reinforcing the continued importance of mysticism to his dramatic development. In The Well of the Saints (1905), we find the final synthesis of the dialectical structure of ‘A Rabelaisian Rhapsody’, and the preparation for Synge’s overt sociological statements regarding modernization in Ireland in his articles ‘From the Congested Districts’, published later the same year. Synge established a spiritual basis for his aesthetic, countering asceticism with pantheism, restriction with Rabelaisian excess. The various iterations of this conflict can be traced over numerous dialogues, scenarios, and plays in his oeuvre, and this dialectical structure became subsumed into a larger literary vision of nonconformity and multidirectional irony. In turn, Synge’s spiritual and aesthetic opposition to ascetic or conforming figures began to influence his understanding of political and social change in contemporary Ireland. Finally, this chapter demonstrates that by reading The Well of the Saints as a play based in Ossianic dialogues, nineteenth-century Celticist readings of racial difference, and conflicting modes of production, we can begin to understand Synge’s drama as one urging consciously towards protest and designed political impact.