J. M. Synge

30:1 Reviews draws his conclusions; McCormack selects and interprets his materials to fit prior theoretical assumptions. Consequently, Ó hÓgáin has a major contribution to Irish studies, McCormack a provocative exercise in revisionist criticism. Mary Helen Thuente Indiana University-Purdue University at Fort Wayne J. M. SYNGE Mary C. King. The Drama of J. M. Synge. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1985. $17.50 The "principal concern" of this book, according to its author, is "to demonstrate that Synge's drama, while it derives much of its material from the folk tradition of Irish people, offers a complex and extremely relevant exploration of the relationships between word and referent, between language and action, between myth and history and between text and world." It is doubtful that anyone would argue with this assertion. The question is whether the same statement could not be made about nearly all drama. Nevertheless, Mary King's treatment of her subject, while uneven as it moves among Synge's works, often provides illuminating insights on many of these relationships. The book opens with biographical material that is inevitably manifest in Synge's writings, moves on to a discussion of The Aran Islands as "a dramatic apprenticeship," and then to the plays, a chapter being devoted to each in chronological order for the most part. Between her discussions of Playboy of the Western World and Synge's last play, Deirdre of the Sorrows, however, King deals with his first, unsuccessful trial, When the Moon Has Set, demonstrating in the juxtaposition the playwright's evolution to maturity and successful dramatic structure. The Aran Islands, King shows, not only provides anecdotes as background to incidents in the plays, but anticipates the plays in form and structure as well. While her analogy of the work with a symphony, based to some extent on Synge's interest in music, tends to be rather strained, her analysis of its dramatic form is convincing. Moreover, she points to the work's undercutting of some of the myths that had attracted Synge himself, and underscores the realistic perspective he had of the life and values of the Island people. The book is anti-antiquarian and anti-romantic, King maintains, affecting the reader through evocation of the quotidian, an evocation of mundane concerns of the Islanders, concerns about money and profit and creature comfort that are universally human. The book, she demonstrates, is not simply a journalistic running account, but a carefully constructed work of art in its own right. 109 30:1 Reviews In regard to the plays, King's analysis of language and structure in the context of life and art is often interesting and useful, but the text bogs down at times with elaboration on the obvious. For example, in reference to Riders to the Sea: Nora's opening words, "Where is she?" (Ill, 5) raises the questions of identity, relationship and place, while Cathleen's staccato enquiry "What is it you have?" (Ill, 5) calls attention to the bundle her sister carries—"a shirt and a plain stocking were got off a drowned man in Donegal" (III, 5). The context does not always justify the considerable amount of plot summary and explanation that can make the reader impatient, but the chapter on Riders to the Sea improves as the pattern of argument becomes clear, focusing as it does on Synge's linguistic modes, used to bridge the real, physical world and the imaginative, spiritual one. Maura's vision and her response to death is in the midst of a realistic, not simply literary or imaginative, drama, aesthetically and emotionally moving as her words may be. Of interest is King's treatment of Synge's dramatic technique as related to the story-telling he experienced himself and recounted in The Aran Islands. While Biblical analogies made in the discussion of Riders to the Sea are useful and illuminating, they are less so in the discussion of In the Shadow of the Glen, where they appear strained and overstated. The linguistic analysis in this chapter is technical and perhaps dubious, but the character analysis, especially in the context of Nora's sexuality as contrasted with Dan's and Michael's, is of...