The Drama of J.M. Synge by Mary C. King (review)

Book Reviews MARY C. KING. The Drama of1.M. Synge. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press 1985pp .viii, 229. $17.50. This book, one of the Irish Studies Series under the shrewd and accomplished general editorship of Richard Fallis, is nOl so much dramatic criticism as an "analysis of the theme of language" in Synge's works, considered in the context of nineteenth-century European philology and philosophy. Mary Kingrelates Synge's "preoccupation with the word" to his family and class origins. Although the focus is on the plays, the author provides two introductory chapters and a final one which sum up her reassessment of Synge. This starts from Katharine Worth's characteristically sharp insight that Synge was not merely a writer of "peasant drama" but wrote self-consciously theatrical plays with a finn sense of language as language; this ensures him a place as an early modern, perhaps even, as Worth argues, "in a way, one of the most modern of the moderns." One need not go that far (nor would I at least want to) in order to discern the great interest of exploring the modernity of Synge. We first trace Synge's early study of Darwin, Archbishop Trench's English Past and Present and The Study a/Words; then we find Synge learning Irish at Trinity before studying Celtic philology at the Sorbonne. For King, Herder's view of the creativity of language, acting as akin to an artist's creativity within an aesthetic tradition, was one great shaping influence on Synge the dramatist. He returned to Ireland well-equipped to study the Aran culture and people through this lens of European scholarship, but also through that of his own, I would say unique, artistic sensibility. King's study aims to uncover the maturing vision in the plays, not by Freudian or Jungian means, but by close textual analysis indebted to the methods of V.N. Volosinov and Kenneth Burke. King's study now shows that the musical organization of The Aran Islands dispels what was once thought to be structural diffuseness and clarifies a modernist experiment, a form of montage which "enacts the meaning symbolically" (p.30, King' s italics), a technique to be used later in the plays. The Marxist emphasis in this study yields some new insights, though in my view to 310 Book Reviews argue as King does that the.new industrial "commodity-based society" utterly changes relationships between Aran islanders, as in Riders to the Sea, so that "they are calculated and stated in tenns of price" is plainly wrong, an ex.ample of the loose sociological musing favoured by some modern critics: farming and fishing communities,long before industrialization, always knew that large numbers of healthy children were a valuable asset; the ancient dowry system was a shrewd peasant grasping at the fact that human flesh had a price in relation to its potential for work and wealth. Truer to the play is Errol Durbach's study of it in relation to the world of Greek tragedy. More accurate and interesting is King's aesthetic insight that "Synge's art is the non-literal and non-assertive art of juxtaposed masterful images: the later Yeats learnt much from his technique" (p. 60). Of course Eisenstein would not have agreed with this description of montage, but the cross-cut from Synge to Yeats is a telling one. The chapter on In the Shadow ojthe Glen is succinct and effective in its discussion of the symbolism of location, the syntax of the dialogue, and the dialectic ofcreativity and fixity. The play's elegiac mood is then inverted by the sense ofcarnival in The Tinker's Wedding. King's account rightly takes its cue from Denis Donoghue'S essay "Too Immoral for Dublin."In this chapter drama is at times treated as "more than words upon the page" (p. 93). Synge's play emerges in "the mainstream" of his dramatic mode with its "sources offolk culture and the European comic tradition" (p. 102). The analysis of The Well ofthe Saints, though, suffers from over-ingenious assertion remote from the play on stage: "The couple are working out, through reciprocity, a mode ofaccess to the past which...