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Synge's Prose Writings: A First View of the Whole
- Modern Drama
- University of Toronto Press
- Volume 11, Number 3, Fall 1968
- pp. 221-226
- 10.1353/mdr.1968.0063
- Article
- Additional Information
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SYNGE'S PROSE WRITINGS: A FIRST VIEW OF THE WHOLE THE PUBLICATION RECENTLY OF THE Oxford University Press definitive edition of ]. M. Synge: Collected Works, Volume II, Prose enables the non-dramatic writings of Synge to be seen as a whole for the first time. The sight is impressive and should further increase his standing which has been steadily going up since the publication of the official biography by David H. Greene and Edward M. Stephens ln 1959. It shows that like Wordsworth, whom he admired and in some ways resembled, Synge the man brooded upon the experiences of his childhood and adolescence, and from this produced autobiographical studies which not only throw singular light on the artist and his work but also provide rare insight into human growth generally. The impulses and fears of a child in an exclusive community, the opening excitements and compensations given by birds and natural scenery, the yearnings and frustrations of passionate adolescence cramped in an obsolete code, are exactly registered by Synge. He apprehended what is valid in the recapitulation theory, the links between the child and primitive man, long before his visits to the Aran Islands, and in his awareness of the interaction between sex and religion, art, and nature, and of the ways in which dedications to the latter three may be expressions or sublimations of sex he foreshadowed Freud. His grasp is further seen in his stress on the value of being part of a community that has not lost touch with the rhythms of nature and traditional crafts and that is not so fragmented as to give insufficient scope for the several-sided development of an individual . In this, and in his dismay at stereotypes and abstractions and at the coarsening and debilitating effects of commercialism, Synge has kinship with Yeats and D. H. Lawrence. Again, Synge's documentation of his growth from a rather precious art-for-art's-sake romanticism to a more realistic vision, mingling compassion and irony-the progress from the simple lyric to comprehensive dramais typical of the evolution not only of Yeats and Joyce but of many ordinary people. The experiments and investigations of modern psychology and sociology have established and gone beyond Synge's intuitions , but these remain valuable since they exist not in clinical generalizations but in terms of individuals in particular localities and in a medium that carries truth alive into the heart by passion. 221 222 MODERN DRAMA December The advantages and disadvantages of Synge's position can now be seen. In some ways he was well placed to write about Ireland. His roots in an influential family, his education, his cultivated acquaintances , and his travels gave him a range of experience and standards of judgment beyond the provincial, while his wise passiveness, his extraordinary capacity for establishing relationships with different people led him to the heart of uniquely valuable but doomed folk cultures. He attained the right point for creativity: involved enough to feel Irish life profoundly yet sufficiently detached and skilled to crystallize it in literature of concern to people both inside and outside Ireland. Like the Tramp in The Shadow of the Glen he appeared and spoke at the crucial time. And the idealized image of the Tramp is noteworthy in Synge. His letters to Molly Allgood he signed "Your Old Tramp," and he saw resemblances between the position of the gifted person in peasant society and that of the artist in bourgeois society. But whereas the peasants (who had "chosen infinite riches in a little room") tolerated if not welcomed the Tramp (who had "chosen penury with a world for habitation") thus enabling him to become a creative outsider, the bourgeois scorned the artist. This was the disadvantage of Synge's position. His family felt that he was wasting his substance and harming his body and soul in associating with artists and peasants and in writing. Hence Synge was driven to justify himself. And one now perceives running through all his work this salient theme-the attempt of a person who wishes to become or has become creative in an original way to demonstrate his vision and values to an indifferent or hostile audience. The...