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THE THEME OF LONELINESS IN THE PLAYS OF SYNGE In the famous preface to The Playboy of the Westem World in which Synge renounces the reality of Ibsen and Zola with its "joyless and pallid words" in favor of a reality clothed in language which is "rich and living," he makes clear the basis of his whole art-conception and language alike-in reality.imaginatively conceived. The "rich joy found only in what is superb and wild in reality" is what he wants his plays to communicate. In describing the folk imagination in Ireland , he describes his own: an imagination that is "fiery and magnificent , and tender." Synge's pronouncement comes with the more force as an introduction to the Playboy because of its extravagant gusto and its laughing perception of human weakness, so hotly and bitterly resented as a satire on Irish life. For in this play, "superb and wild" as it is in its humor, we see the same combination of fiery magnificence and tenderness which marks all Synge's work from the early, faultlessly perfected little one-act play, Riders to the Sea to Deirdre of the Sorrows, the tremendously conceived collection of stirring scenes which his death kept him from bringing into a finally integrated artistic whole. With all the joy and richness in Synge's perception of human life, tl'ere is mingled his tender awareness of the pitifulness of our human condition, which he always conceives in terms of loneliness. The tl,eme of loneliness pervades his dramas. It is there in the very desolateness of the settings which help to create the feeling. It causes the actual sufferings which make the plots. It is the symbol of suffering in which the characters express tl,eir sense of human sadness. And finally, the voicing of its music so infuses the dialogue that the plays become almost a poem of loneliness. 1. The statement of the scenes as we read: "An Island off the West of Ireland" or "Some lonely mountainous district," releases our imaginations for what pictures of desolation we will. The effect is the same if we see on the stage the "Country public-house or shebeen, very rough and untidy" in which Pegeen Mike, "a wild-looking but fine girl, of . about twenty, is writing at table." When we see Nora Burke uneasy in her cottage, we know it is "The last cottage at the head of a long glen," before she says "and I a lone woman with no house near me." The settings through which Deirche moves are as remote from human habi84 1958 THE THEM E OF LONELINESS IN SYNGE 85 tation. Even when she comes back to her death to the high seats of Emain, she is pu" t in an outer tent, '~a shabby, ragged place ... with frayed rugs and skins ... eaten by the moths" and is left desolate, separated first from Ainnle and Ardan and finally from Naisi. II. The measure of her suffering is the loneliness, "the hardness of death," which has come between her and Naisi, not her own dying. Indeed, all of Synge's plots evolve out of the struggle to assuage the immeasurable loneliness of the spirit. The beauty of the action with its terror and pity grows almost solelyfrom this. Synge's characters are as innocent of an Aristotelian tragic flaw cirr.matically conceived as they are full of the flecks and flaws of human weakness poctically imagined. What leads them to suffering and to death is neither the hamartia of the Sophoclean hero nor the confusion of Galsworthy's victims of social forces. It is their longing for human companionship, for some other being to enter into theirs and help them break down the isolation into which they were born. The conception of loneliness as a source of plot grows as the characters who suffer grow in complexity. Mamya's desolation in Riders to the Sea is the perfectly simple, uncomplicated anguish of ti,e mother whose sons are taken from her. She knows her doom in advance: "He's gone now, God spare us, and we'll not see him again. He's gone now, and when the black...

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