Sean O'Casey's Drama: Verisimilitude and Vision by Ronald Gene Rollins, and: O'Casey's Satiric Vision by B.L. Smith (review)

Book Reviews RONALD GENE ROLLINS. Sean O'Casey's Drama: Verisimilitude and Vision. University. Alabama: University of Alabama Press 1979. Pp. viii, 139. B.t. SMITH. O'Casey's Satiric Vision. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press 1978. pp. x, 197. "A good realistic first act, like Juno. an incongruously phantasmic second act, trailing off into a vague and unreal sequel: could anything be wronger?" (Shaw. to O'Casey, 19 June 1928). Itis this splendid "wrongness" - to pursue Shaw's ironic Irishism to its conclusion - that accounts not only for the peculiar excellence of The Silver Tassie, but for the very quintessence of O'Caseyism: a combination of disparate theatrical elements into a finally unclassifiable genre which makes O'Casey a dramatist sui generis. His "wrongness " may be a purely academic issue and quite impertinent to the performance of his plays, as Roben Hogan (the critic as actor/director) and Katharine Worth (the critic as theatregoer) have consistently argued. But this yoking of incongruous elements "wrongly " together has, understandably, been a compelling theme of O'Casey scholarship for the past twenty years in whatever way these qualities of style have been variously defined: Tragedy and Comedy. Realism and Expressionism, Illusion and Actuality, or, as in Ronald Rollins's most recent contribution to this inquiry, Verisimilitude and Vision. Professor Rol1ins's thesis is ingenious. In his opening theoretical chapter he locates O'Casey's dualities in the "psychic ambivalence" which is said to characterise the national temperament: that combination of Swift and Berkeley, realist and mystic, which defines the Dubliner forever gazing towards Byzantium. O'Casey, he writes: is very much the Blakean hope-fostered visionary. an inspired poet-prophet who is continually contrasting, in his utopian projections, this present world of hunger and dirt with an indistinct but realizable future world of beauty and blessedness. Thus it is this poetic impulse in O'Casey that enables him to b'aDscend bis disappointment with mundane matters and enables him "to resist the duties of life, the threat of death, and relax in loud hilarity as if the sun himself were a dancer, sorrow and pain merely mists on a mirror.I. (p. 9) Book Reviews 235 These last few phrases are O'Casey's own - a fact which compounds the difficulties I have with Professor Rollins's governing idea and its application to the drama as a whole. It is not, ] hope. merely idiosyncratic to feel repelled by the insouciant Romanticism that defines "this poetic impulse" - .. 'to resist the duties of life, the threat of death, and relax in loud hilarity' " - which smacks uncomfortably of the Boyle philosophy and its moral failure to confront reality. There is something appallingly slack here, something which denies not only the hope-fostered dreams of Blake, but even the vigorous and energetic vision of Ayamonn himself, who sees the shape of a new world in a shilling. "Vision," from the outset, is too loosely defined if it fails to distinguish between regressive Romantic fantasies and acts of the creative and transfonning imagination. And my own sense of O'Casey as a moralist and a realist - in the broadest. most generous sense of these terms - is shaken by the evident discrepancy between the values stated in his non-dramatic writings and the values enacted in his plays. I would prefer to believe that the visionary O'Casey is not the dreamy Celt, but the poet who strategically leaves a copy of The Wild Duck in the fantasy-infested parlour ofthe Boyles. O'Casey's Reality and his Idealism, I would prefer to believe, exist in a close symbiotic affinity rather than in the stark opposition of Dublin and Byzantium. And this may very well be Professor Rollins's point in his brief description of the pennutations and combinations within the Vision/Verisimilitude dichotomy. In The Plough and the Stars "vision is present to militate against the verisimilitude" (p. 20). In The Silver Tassie "O'Casey had imposed an artist's pattern (his vision) upon war's pandemonium (a shell-blasted verisimilitude)" (p. 54). In Within the Gates "we have a fusion that results in visionary verisimilitude" (p. 63). And, in the final analysis, O'Casey offers...