Synge's The Aran Islands and Irish Creative Nonfiction

Synge's self-described "first serious work"¹ shares many characteristics with what we today call creative nonfiction—a loosely defined, popular, and controversial genre that extends to first-person travel accounts, memoir, spiritual autobiography, literary journalism, and more. However hard it may be to define creative nonfiction, most theorists agree that it often draws on techniques employed in other literary forms: dialogue, a dramatic storyline, and reportage, for instance. Lee Gutkind has said that "creative nonfiction heightens the whole concept and idea of essay writing. It allows a writer to employ the diligence of a reporter, the shifting voices and viewpoints of a novelist, the refined wordplay of a poet and the analytical modes of the essayist."² These words well describe Synge's at-times-inscrutable narrative maneuvers in The Aran Islands, a book that should be read as an early masterpiece of the genre. A pastiche of lyricism, reportage, precise description, and dramatic vignettes rendered in journalistic detail, The Aran Islands stands near the front of an evolving Irish nonfiction tradition.³

Travel writing has long been a staple of Irish writing; the essay, too, has its own tradition, with Shaw, Wilde, Lady Gregory, and Yeats among the modern canonical figures associated with the essay and autobiography—but their work bears little resemblance to the creative nonfiction of our era. With the possible exception of Wilde's confessional and accusatory "De Profundis," among the canonical Irish writers it is Synge's The Aran Islands that most resembles contemporary nonfiction. We recognize the pattern: an ostensible travel account in an "exotic" location, narrated by an apparently alienated writer, in search of what he does not explain or yet fully understand. Synge's set-up is so good, in fact, that it has served as the touchstone for numerous later magazine articles that attempt to retrace and relive his visits, or to fill in the many historical, sociological, and cultural details that he quite purposefully left out of the account; Andrew McNellie's book-length memoir An Aran Keening (2002) is one of the most ambitious of these. Yet, in general, critics have interpreted the book as a developmental dress rehearsal for the plays.

One notable exception is the work of William E. Hart, who examined the book on its own terms—as nonfiction—and found it a deeply textured work of art. In Synge's First Symphony: The Aran Islands (1993), Hart argues that Synge designed the book in the structure of the sonata allegro form.⁴ Hart's structural explanation of The Aran Islands is never strained and reveals the text's nuanced surfaces and startling depths. Music, Hart believes, formed the core of Synge's prose aesthetic. Synge, after all, spent the first part of his life studying and playing music, and his most brilliant composition may be the grace with which he transposed his experience on Inis Meáin and Inis Oírr into the shifting rhythms within The Aran Islands.

This approach echoes other frequently cited theories of essay writing. Theodor Adorno's "The Essay as Form," for example, argues that the essay is different from logical argumentation and fiction, because it uses different devices to reach its readers. Adorno believes that the essay and music communicate in similar ways. He argues that the "essay approaches the logic of music" because essays often lack a formal rhetorical approach and unity. They repudiate conclusive deductions, Adorno writes, in favor of "cross-connections between elements" within them.⁵ These elements function like repetitive notes and chords within a musical score. The essay, Adorno writes, "does not try to seek the eternal in the transient and distill it out; it tries to render the transient eternal."⁶ This process of rendering transitory experience while composing a complex prose "score" was something that Synge worked toward before his visit to Aran.

Prose works that Synge drafted in his notebook prior to his stay on Aran are a vivid record of his growth as an artist. "Vita Vecchia," written between 1895 and 1897, is a prosimetrum, a blend of poetry and prose. Synge drew...