The Dialectics of Space in Synge's The Shadow of the Glen

The Dialectics of Space in Synge's The Shadow of the Glen ASPASIA VELISSARIOU The conflict between staying and leaving in Synge's plays has, so far, attracted a great deal of critical notice. It has become a commonplace that his main characters face a crucial choice: either to stay within the boundaries of a certain community or to abandon it for wandering or for death. At the same time, a number of Synge's thematic preoccupations, such as the passing of time, the fear of loneliness, and the transience of love, have repeatedly been connected to this choice. This article, using The Shadow of the Glell as a paradigmatic expression of fundamental tensions in Synge, attempts a redefinition of the very same conflict between staying and leaving, by setting it into a different methodological context. While not ignoring its thematic importance , I treat the conflict as a major structural antithesis organizing this particular play, and Synge's drama as a whole, in terms of an opposition between the mimetic space (that which is made visible and represented on the stage) and the diegetic space (that which is referred to by the characters).' The opposition between these two forms of dramatic space is also associated with the general tendency of the main characters to "lose" their mimetic dimension and become purely diegetic.' It is as if this movement from visible and material to invisible and imaginary betrays a certain dissatisfaction on the part of the author with the very genre he has chosen, an uneasiness vis-a-vis the nature and limits of dramatic discourse. The overall impetus of Synge's plays towards diegesis can be seen as a distancing from the mimetic mode specific to drama, and as the simultaneous privileging of narrative over dramatic discourse. It is important. however, to notice that these two discourses are not visibly brought into conflict on the stage; nor are they employed by Synge in such a way as to undermine each other, thus operating as metadramatic comment on the function of dramatic codes, which is often the case with the work of Beckett and Ionesco, for example.3 While narrative does affect the perception of the dramatic events, it is not presented in tenns Model'll Drama, 36 (1993) 409 410 ASPASIA VELISSARIOU of a different, "alternative" discursive organization. It appears rather as an ideal but imaginary (offstage) resolution of the contradictions intrinsic to the way in which the characters C'perceive" their mimetic existence and especially their relationship to space. Their moving away from the mimetic space towards the diegetic is the very term allowing their transportation into the narrative mode. One of the most interesting aspects in Synge is that his main characters seem to have a metafictional awareness of their future position within legend, that form of narrative which can confer upon them a much-desired immortality . Departure and the acceptance of death are presented as the only premises for their inscription into legend. These two endings, the only ones that Synge has found in all his plays,- are the necessary closures in a type of drama which is marked by its disdain for the temporariness of the dramatic mode and its admiration for the everlasting power of legend. They represent the protagonists' final transfonnation from mimetic into diegetic characters, and especially into legendary figures who, by virtue of their discursive position, overwhelm time. Legend, or rather the prospect of being talked about, is offered as the symbolic surpassing of the constraints of the mimetic, signalling its defeat by the diegetic. The outcome of the conflict takes place outside the area of the visual, in the spectators' imagination, and in this sense it belongs more to the narrative mode. Synge's shifting of dramatic reference from mimetic to verbal and the final privileging of a narrative "elsewhere" over the "here and now" of the dramatic discourse are two central moves in a strategy of departure from the visual. His drama draws attention to the fact that the stage is "an immediate presence" of what is, in reality, an absent fictional world that the spectators are called to perceive as present and real.' Yet, by verbally focusing on an...