Reading Dialogic Correspondence: Synge's The Aran Islands

After one hundred years, how might we read John Millington Synge's The Aran Islands anthropologically and ethnographically? The book bears a long history of interpretations by Synge's contemporaries, by literary artists and scholars, and by anthropologists.¹ All of these interpreters critique, correctly, the romantic interests in "primitives" particular to both the Revivalist political aesthetic and to early colonial anthropology—and to its product, fieldwork ethnography. More recently, scholars have salvaged Synge from the Orientalist-cum-nationalist box and argued that he develops an early form of realism from a "displaced nostalgia."² Scholars also note that while conforming to the still-emergent ethnographic conventions of his time, Synge simultaneously challenges these conventions through his autobiographic presence.³

Considered as an ethnographic work, this should not surprise us, if by ethnography we mean "the attempt to understand another life world using the self—as much of it as possible—as the instrument of knowing."⁴ Anthropologists now recognize the dangers of primitivism, and they have internalized the critique of power differentials, including colonial and postcolonial analyses, that condition so many modern epistemologies. And anthropologists have internalized something else: an understanding that ethnography itself is a cultural practice, and a dialogic one at that.⁵

The Aran Islands and the Aran Islands are both historically specific discursive objects—"places" are always arbitrated concepts—overlapping perhaps, but not isomorphic. The Aran Islands is certainly fictive, but like all fiction it is constrained by what is possible. Reading it now ethnographically, one can sense a creative agency expressed through particular cultural practices, with linguistic practices being primary. There is little interest in The Aran Islands in archaeological anthropology as Synge is interested in other types of artifacts, among them languages, bodies, and folklore. His physical anthropology, his "ethnometry," resides in his musings on the supposed correspondence between physical features and personality, an awkward, and to our ears unseemly, traverse of the Cartesian divide.

Reading Synge's text as straight ethnography is problematic, as others have noted.⁶ But Synge's autobiographic and dialogic presence is itself part of the potential ethnography that is The Aran Islands. As a writer—as the "graph" of the term "ethnographer"—he shifts from the agent-patient approach of the natural sciences, and instead develops a novel ethnographic disposition, a dialogic disposition. Though there is in The Aran Islands the residue of "objective scientific" ambition, there is also the subjective, and ultimately, the more human: for what are we, but subject—or subjected, as Nietzsche would have it—positions?

Of talking with Máirtín, old and blind, Synge's first teacher and guide in Inis Mór, Synge writes,

Then we talked about Inishmaan.

"You'll have an old man to talk with you over there," he said, "and tell you stories of the fairies, but he's walking about with two sticks under him this ten year. Did ever you hear what it is goes on four legs when it is young, and on two legs after that, and on three legs when it does be old?"

I gave him the answer.

"Ah, master," he said, "you're a cute one, and the blessing of God be on you. Well, I'm on three legs this minute, but the old man beyond is back on four; I don't know if I'm better than the way he is; he's got his sight and I'm only an old dark man.'"⁷

Mikhail Bakhtin analytically describes two forms of Socratic dialogue as "anacrisis" and "syncrisis." Anacrisis requires, or demands, a response, "the provocation of the word by the word."⁸ The semantic content of such exchanges includes the formal reproduction of subject positions and differentials. In contrast, syncrisis is the bringing together of perspectives, in Bakhtin's assessment, concordant with his concept of heteroglossia. From my own fieldwork in contemporary spoken Irish in Aran, ag labhairt ("to speak") seems more anacritic and ag caint ("to talk") more syncritic. The mixture of syncrisis stands in contrast to what Bakhtin argues is the monologic impetus of the classical dialectic...