The Vision of J. M. Synge: A Study of The Playboy of the Western World

THE VISION OF J. M. SYNGE: A STUDY OF THE. PLAYBOY OF THE. WESTERN WORLD By Bernard Laurie Edwards (St. Michaels University School) In the years since the first performance of The Playboy of the Western World (26 January 1907) the themes and motifs of Synge's dramatic writings have been analysed in terms of the growth of his personal vision and as they anticipate the subsequent development of modern theatre. Unlike the partisan reviewers who first interpreted the literature of Ireland's dramatic renaissance, the modern reader, one hopes, is conscious of the temporary nature of moral codes and is capable of appreciating the permanence of Synge*s characters. His art, we know now, is far more universal in its implications than was thought possible in the furor of the riots set off by the first presentation of The Playboy. Una Ellis-Fermor has suggested, for instance, that Synge was concerned with a reconciliation of nature-mysticism and dramatic form.I Indeed the complexity of Synge's work has given occasion for a number of book-length studies, such as Alan Price's illuminating discussion of the tension between dream and actuality in all of Synge's plays.2 And the pervasive mocking irony of The Playboy permits at least one critic to identify a link between Synge's comedy and the plays of Samuel Beckett. Like most artists Synge was concerned to express what can not be communicated directly. The problem, he suggested in a I906 note, is "finding a universal expression for the particular emotions and ideas of the personality of the artist himself."3 His treatment of individual situations and experiences, in the major writings, shows that he moved from the particular to the universal. In The Aran Islands, for example, Donna Gerstenberger argues, primary interest is created through "the universal patterns which reveal themselves against the background of the primitive, rocky islands."^· In Riders to the Sea, also, the constant presence of the sea contributes to an impression of nature as a hostile force and to the sense of inevitability which makes the play so reminiscent of Greek tragedy. In other plays, particularly The Well of the Saints, Synge exploited the rich vein of biblical imagery and symbol to achieve a significance which might otherwise have been impossible. "Journalism may be literary," he wrote in a 1904 notebook, "literature is always scriptural" (IV, xxx). Except for his last, unfinished play, however, Synge did not choose to employ a myth-structure which was readily available and which had already served Yeats and AE. He was not willing to sacrifice, even in Deirdre of the Sorrows, unique, individual, psychological drama for something "Cuchulanoid" or "spring-dayish ." Myth is never permitted to obscure the drama of the individual in Synge's plays ¡ it is incorporated, as it were, into an individual's conscious or intuitive being. Although he used myth in a conventionally dramatic way, Synge's concern, as Gerstenberger suggests, was with the psychologically important myth of personality. In constantly re-working The Playboy, "Synge came to realize that the real scene of the play is, finally , Christy's imagination, just as the real action of the play is, finally, the growth of his conception of self."5 Myth, whether deriving from history and tradition or immediate situations and attitudes, requires belief. As Robin Skelton remarks in his comprehensive study of Synge's writings, Synge's characters "embody or exemplify attitudes and principles of universal significance. They are thus, every one of them, to a greater or lesser extent, ironic creations, for they are unaware of their own cosmic significance as exemplars and embodiments, while struggling desperately to achieve lesser dignities."° In his last two plays Synge's protagonists, after helping to create and then to assert myth, fuse myth and reality, Deirdre, who is so much a victim of prophecies she can not ignore, eventually confronts reality and achieves an understanding of the predicament of everyman at the edge of Naisi's grave. The myth of Christy Mahon's personality, on the other hand, is created by immediate social influences and by the power of his own imagination . But he too is forced to accept the...