The Aran Islands Revisited

JOHN WILSON FOSTER The Aran Islands Revisited The Irish Revival saw among writers and cultural nationalists a deep interest in the western seaboard and islands of Ireland. This was largely because it seemed that in the west could be found lively remnants of a unified, preconquest civilization and of a passionate community such as we had all composed before the emergence of cities, industry, class, and warring systems - before, in fine, the separateness of self. It could be argued that John Millington Synge, for example, shared as an ideal with other Revival writers this anti-historical and romantic flight from self and sodetyinto archaic unity and thatitis given documentary as well as poetic expression in The Aran Islands (1907). There is a good deal of truth in this rather conventional account of what is one of the most important prose works of the Revival, and indeed I would like to supplement the account with what I hope are some fresh remarks about the well-known influence on Synge of contemporary Breton writing inspired, like The Aran Islands, by the conviction that archaic community persisted on the Celticfringes of modern European civilization, and with some fresh observations on the class ideology of the westward and Celtic bias. Even so, the conventional account is only half the story, and strikes me as inadequate in failing to convey the full range of Synge's psychic and spiritual experiences on the islands. If one does appreciate the full range of these experiences, one ends up by turning the orthodoxaccount onits head and by seeingSynge, mutatis mutandis, as less like the Wordsworth of the Preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads, with his interest in humble and rustic life, than like the Keats of the great odes. And if we also recognize in The Aran Islands some tenuous contact with Yeats's apocalyptic stories, we have a worthwhile sense of the variety of Revival romanticisms. I In The Aran Islands Synge writes of the islanders' 'strange archaic sympathies with the world," sympathies expressed partly through everydayimplementsand objects whose materials 'tosomeextentpeculiar to the island ... seem to existas a natural link between the people and the world that is about them' (p 59), partly through the very carriage of the islanders who have preserved, by the absence of the heavy boot of UNIVlIRSIn' OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 51, NUMBER 3, SPRING 1982 C\042-Q2471821oS00-02.4B-0263$ot.solo C UNlVERSnY OF TORONTO PRESS SYNGE'S Aran [siJlnds 249 Europe, 'the agile walk of the wild animal' (p 66). This world, peopled by 'strange men with receding foreheads, high cheek-bones, and ungovernable eyes' who 'seem to represent some old type found on these few acres at the extreme border of Europe' (p 140), is a world innocent of the modern notion of time, where 'it would be useless to fix an hour, as the hours are notrecognised' (p 115). Itis equally innocent, in a way that must have pleased Yeats, of the modern distinction between the natural and the supernatural, a psychology more ancient than the imitative psychology of the Revivalists who were aware of the distinction but proclaimed a collateral beliefin both. 'My intercourse with these people: Synge writes, not without humour, 'has made me realise that miracles must abound wherever the new conception of law is not understood. On these islands alone miracles enough happen every year to equip a divine emissary. Rye is turned into oats, storms are raised to keep evictors from the shore, cows that are isolated on lonely rocks bring forth calves, and other things of the same kind are common' (p 128). Synge's interest in the supernatural was more than an eye for the droll, however, and before going to the Aran Islands he read Paulam's Nouveau mysticisme and inquired into psychical literature.2 Not only the mind and physique of the islanders butalso their sexuality assumes an older form: 'The direct sexual instincts are not weak on the island,' Synge writes of lnishmaan, 'but they are so subordinated to the instincts of the family that they rarely lead to irregularity. The life here is still at an almost patriarchal stage, and the people are...