The Dramaturgy of the Other: Diegetic Patterns in Synge's The Playboy of the Western World

The Dramaturgy of the Other: Diegetic Patterns in Synge's The Playboy of the Western World UNA CHAUDHURI "It may be hinted," wrote Synge, "[that there are] several sides to the Playboy.'" The story behind this remark (surely unmatched among authorial statements for crushing irony) is well known: the play's tumultuous premiere, the nightly riots, the .storm of journalistic abuse, the fog of swirling incomprehension. To this day the Playboy scandal "frames" Synge's great play with its irresistible sensationalism. No discussion of The Playboy of the Western World (including, of course, this one) seems able to dispense with a more or less extended rehearsal of the original critical melodrama. The result is an irony that doubles Synge's own: his very efforts to wrench the play away from the narrow perspectives that threatened to stifle it at its birth have contributed powerfully to the tenacity with which those very perspectives continue to hold it in their iron grip. Thus the play remains strongly identified with its place of origin, with Ireland, and the question of its attitude to its characters is inevitably framed within a problematic of Synge's politiconational vision. While Synge's claims of universality for his play have certainly borne fruit in many psychological and mythological readings" the figures of Oedipus, Christ, Don Quixote, etc. that are recovered from the play are invariably clothed as Men of Aran, their psycho-mythological significance mediated by their racial identity. Synge himself is partly responsible for this situation, or, rather, he himself was equally embroiled in its contradictions: having first denied that the play was intended as a realistic portrayal ofirish people, he then went on to say that it was based on an actual and not untypical incident.3 This paradoxical claim-and-denial of direct representation inaugurates a long tradition of Playboy criticism, for it would not be too reductive to say that contemporary critics remain divided more or less along the same lines that the play's original detractors and defenders were: those who are captured by the play's extravagant naturalism see it as an indictment - or at least a shuddering recognition - ofthe Diegetic Patterns in The Playboy 375 dark, anarchic, and anti-social impulse in human nature, while those more attentive to the play's poetty read it as an inspired and intoxicating celebration of that very same impulse. Both kinds of readings, however, refer back to the mimetic question of the status of "Ireland" in the play, whether as a point of departure or a port of anival. Could we say, then, that the Playboy has been wrongly "framed," in both the technical and colloquial senses of the word? Has its imprisonment within an originary context powerfully constrained, as well as seriously distorted, its readings? If so, then the play's history has simply re-enacted its theme, which, as I will argue, is precisely the problem of framing, of the difference between the "inside" and the "outside." The many "problems" of the play (problems of genre, of the status of the protagonist, etc.) may be largely due not to the play itself, but, as often happens, to the critical strategies that have been brought to bear on it. The traditional approach to this as to other dramatic texts has been, of course, literary: that is to say, the critic enters the play through the dialogue, construing this dialogue primarily as the joint discourse of several competing or complementary (but in any case, interactive) subjectivities. These subjectivities - or, simply, subjects -are then further construed, or constructed, in terms of either social or psychological codes of identity; that is to say, the characters are either regarded as representative types, embodying the supposed beliefs and values of an actual social group, or as full-fledged (virtual) individuals, complete with personal motives, neuroses, ideals, and prejudices which may be and often are in conflict with those ofthe social group to which they purportedly belong. When applied to Synge's play, this procedure yields two distinct groups of subjects. The fIrst consists ofthe villagers, who partake ofan exclusively social identity (that is to say, they are regarded as representatives of a type of ideological formation which...