Synge's The Aran Islands (1907)

They are all in The Aran Islands, the characteristics we now recognize as Syngean—a sensitive response to nature, delight in language and action, attentiveness to a good story, contrapuntal structure, sympathetic acceptance of grief, violence, and loss.

But here, in Synge's first finished work, some of those qualities are muted, while others, not yet fully developed, even in hindsight seem to be immature and unprotected. We should not be surprised by this vulnerability, for Synge's eighteen weeks on Aran (spread over a four-year period) shocked him more into awareness of himself than into any understanding of a world that he persisted in considering the outermost ridge of European civilization. Despite the care with which he organized his memories and adjusted details of language and custom in the finished manuscript, there is something raw and unprepared about his responses to life in "this little corner on the face of the world." The reporter's objective stance claimed in his introduction—almost echoing Lady Gregory's apologia for selectiveness in her Cuchulain of Muirthemne (1902)—belies the unguarded openness with which he explores his own reactions while admitting his inability to understand. "I have given a direct account of my life on the islands, and of what I met with among them, inventing nothing, and changing nothing that is essential."¹

Far from being a contemporary travel narrative, Synge's The Aran Islands is as artificial and elaborate as his later plays. So overwhelmed is he by his own immediate reactions to this experience that he has to remind himself to record the prosaic details of work, everyday responsibility, and "seasonal manufacture." The ugly and unacceptable aspects of life are excused and exonerated on the grounds of foreignness and primitiveness; recent changes go unreported as "not worth while to deal with." Much is omitted in this discovery of a new world so close to Europe, yet so far from his comprehension.

One cannot help but think of Rousseau and Pater: the words "primitive" and "archaic" surface regularly as Synge repeatedly comments on his feelings of isolation, exile, and strangeness. When speaking in English, the Islanders appear to be wrestling with a "foreign tongue" and he perfunctorily dismisses their "endless talk" about tides and the price of fish; he feels more at home with the cries of the gannets, crows, and cormorants on the clifftops than with the continual drone of Gaelic heard from his room next door. When in the kitchen he remains the outsider, silently observing the unselfconscious activities of the women. While on the cliff paths with his friend Michael and the old storytellers, or observing energetic activities at the pier, he is constantly aware of his own clumsy civilized form in contrast to his companions' "agile walk of the wild animal," of the men's "extraordinary personal dexterity" and skills sharpened against the elements.

"It gave me a moment of exquisite satisfaction to find myself moving away from civilization in this rude canvas canoe that has served primitive races since men first went on the sea." (AI 12). It is in his own direct response to nature, not to the people around him, that Synge reveals most about himself and, indirectly, about what he sees as the true life of the Islands. On his forlorn walks in the desolate mists and rains, dejection and despair always threaten, while the education of the waves not only exposes Synge at his most Pateresque but also betrays the morbidity that will hang over his later poetry and his final play. In describing his dangerous journeys by curagh the language rises to its greatest intensity—"exquisite satisfaction," "glory and power," "curious zest"—matched only by occasional flashes of exultation during the raging storms and wind experienced on lonely cliff walks, when the bay is "full of green delirium."

Death is ever-present and expected in this overwhelming energy of nature. The grief of the keen over a young man's drowning is echoed in the thunder sounding a "death-peal of extraordinary grandeur"; meditations on his own mortality frequently follow the exhilaration of the tumultuous hurling of...