Daniel Corkery's Cultural Criticism: Selected Writings

Synge and Irish Literature

iNteNSit y in his study of Synge, Mr. Corkery reveals some of that ‘quality of intenseness and power of impassioned contemplation’which he finds in that tragedy.7 He guides us in the exploration of the dramatist’s shy and brooding personality, as Synge himself explored the people of the West.Thus guided, with wonder and excitement, we ‘feel our way into his mind.’8 The language that still has growth in it, the command of ‘unbookish words’ which Mr. Corkery likes in his subject, he, too, may claim; and what life, what reality they give to his style! How instantly the imagination catches his meaning when he writes of ‘the vexing criss-cross of daily life,’of life ‘broken up, as ours is, with the hissing and snapping of opinions!’9 That immediacy is one secret, all through the reading, of the exhilaration produced by the book.Thoughts and moods of our own, hitherto dormant, gather themselves together and leap, at the critic’s summons, into response. reading criticism of this quality is a release from a burden of bewilderment and a lasting illumination of the mind. * * * Synge and irish Literature1 Mr. Corkery’s book falls for consideration into two divisions, into what he has to say about the work of Synge, and into his theorems and conclusions about irish literature in english, or ‘anglo-irish’ literature, as he prefers to call it. other commentators have written about anglo-irish literature, with the difference that they were using anglo-irish as an identifying label rather than as a definition. Mr. Corkery however, going beyond ernest Boyd and Thomas Macdonagh, uses it as a definition. for him anglo-irish literature is not irish at all – curiously enough, save Synge. and Synge is admitted to be irish merely for use as a stick to beat all the rest, from Maria edgeworth to Mr. yeats.to most people the phrase anglo-irish literature means irish literature written in english. to Mr. Corkery it means english literature written in an irish dialect of english. This would be understandable and consistent if his position were that irish literature can be written only in the irish language. But it is not. His position is that it is not language but material that matters. Synge’s material, in some unknown way, is better than that of Mr. yeats, and therefore Synge is ‘a portent’ while Mr. yeats is a Part Four. Contemporary Reception 203 minor english poet. Maybe it serves Mr. yeats right for forcing Synge on the literary world as a genius. i will come later on to Mr. Corkery’s general theory about irish literature, but it will be convenient first to get Synge out of the way. Mr. Corkery attempts, twenty-five years after the hurly-burly, a re-valuation of Synge, and many of his conclusions will not be quarrelled with by anybody, even though few people will arrive at them in precisely the same way.The amazing thing, considering his bias and his impatience, is that he puts Synge so high, higher for instance than i would. He finds Riders to the Sea ‘almost perfect,’2 The Well of the Saints ‘the most irish of all he wrote,’3 Deirdre of the Sorrows ‘a ripened artistry,’4 defends In the Shadow of the Glen, mildly rebukes The Tinker’s Wedding,says pleasant generalities about Poems andTranslations,and has a high opinion of the aran and Wicklow essays – ‘Sometimes i have the idea that the book on the aran islands will outlive all else that came from Synge’s pen.’5 even for The Playboy he has only very mild reproof. Mr. Corkery is under the very great disadvantage, in dealing with Synge, of starting out with a theory. His theory is that Synge is the only ‘ascendancy’ writer who became a Nationalist (culturally, not politically), that he lived with the people, put himself en rapport with their consciousness, and that his writings are the result of that. Having adopted that theory to start with he must necessarily make the best of his exemplar and belabour all the other ‘ascendancy’ writers, which he does. He tells us that the irish language was the key to it all. But in Synge’s case it does not seem to have been the key. He learned irish at trinity. Mr. Corkery, in chronicling that, permits himself a cheap sneer at trinity. But he utterly fails to realise the significance of it to his own...