Authors: Declan Kiberd
The radical implications of the manly woman of Gaelic tradition were deflected by the Mayo villagers, even as the sensuous images drawn from the love-songs of Connacht were denounced as titillating by some puritans of the Gaelic League. It is ironic to recall, in this context, that the League's own president had edited the book from which Synge looted some of the most disturbing lines. Synge shrewdly remarked, however, that a writer could get away with things in Irish which would not be tolerated in English: a point depressingly confirmed in the 1940s when the independent state banned an English-language version of
The Midnight Court,
though the far more ribald Irish-language version remained available. Revivalism was proving rigidly selective of that which was worthy to be revived and translated into popular versions. Sexuality, it seemed, was not to be deanglicized. The conclusion of Synge's play proved bitterly prophetic of the sexual politics of the new state, which would deny the manly woman epitomized by
Constance Markievicz and Maud Gonne, opting instead for de Valera's maidens at the rural crossroads, themselves a pastoral figment
of the late-Victorian imagination. And thus a people who, in the nineteenth century, had thought in Irish while speaking English, came in the twentieth to "think English" even while they were speaking Irish.
The spark that lit the
Playboy
riots is well known, recorded in the famous telegram sent by Lady Gregory summoning Yeats to return at once from Scotland: "Audience broke up in disorder at use of the word 'shift' ".
44
The controversial lines represented a modest, if mocking, reworking by Synge of a scene in the national epic. In the play, Christy tells the Widow Quin "it's Pegeen I'm seeking only, and what'd I care if you brought me a drift of chosen females, standing in their shifts itself maybe, from this place to the eastern world".
45
In Lady Gregorys
Cuchulain of Muirthemne
the hero regularly returns from combat filled with a
battle-rage,
which leads the men of Ulster to forbid his entry to the city of Emhain Macha. They fear that his spasms might destroy peace and damage city buildings, and so they conduct earnest discussions of the ways in which his ardour might be cooled. This is finally achieved by sending thirty women, stark naked, across the plain of Macha in serried ranks: and when the hero sees them, he blushes to his
roots,
casts down his
eyes,
and with that (say the manuscripts)
"the
wildness went out of him".
46
In his typescript version, Synge had his maidens "stripped itself"
47
(rather than in "shifts itself") but was clearly advised by Yeats that the more puritanical members of the Abbey audience could not tolerate such candour. (With commendable innocence, Yeats appears not to have realized that a scantily-clad woman can be even more inflammatory than a naked woman to the puritanical male mind.) The word "shift" had been used without offence in Hyde's
Love Songs of Connacht
(in Irish, of course, as
léine
): but when Synge politely pointed this out in a newspaper interview, the point was left unexplored in the ensuing controversy.
48
It is hard, at the same time, not to feel some sympathy for the protesting audiences in the play's first week. Most were nationalist males
49
who frequented the theatre for political reasons, since the Abbey was one of the few national institutions in occupied Ireland. Few men anywhere in the Europe of 1907 could have coped with Synge's subversive gender-benders, least of all a group committed to the social construction of precisely the kind of Cuchulanoid heroism which the playwright was so mischievously debunking. Irishmen had been told that when
they
protested their voices rose to an unflattering female screech: and so they were off loading the vestigial femininity of the Celtic male onto icons like Cathleen ní Houlihan or Mother Ireland.
These were the men who accused Synge of "betraying the forces of virile nationalism"
50
to a movement of decadence. They were hardening themselves into hypermasculinity, in preparation for an uprising, rather than adopting the more complex strategy of celebrating their own androgyny. That Synge preferred the latter option is clear from the tripartite structure of his play, which corresponds very neatly with Frantz Fanon's dialectic of decolonization, from occupation, though nationalism, to liberation.
In Act One, Christy finds a false image of himself in the cracked mirror of his father's cruel home, the very image of Irish self-disgust under colonial misrule. In Act Two, he then discovers an over-flattering image of himself in the perfect mirror of Pegeen's shebeen, the very acme of Irish pride under the conditions of a self-glorifying revival. But nationalism, as Fanon warned, is not liberation, since it still persists in defining itself in categories imposed by the colonizer. A revolution couched in such terms is taken away from a people even as they perform it: it is only by breaking out of the binaries, through to a third point of transcendence, that freedom can be won.
51
Only in Act Three can Christy forget about the good opinion of others, throw that mirror away and construct himself out of his own desire (as opposed to allowing himself to become the locus for the desire of others). Only then does he lose the marks of a provincial who is doomed to define himself through the distorting mirror of a public opinion shaped in some faraway centre of authority.
The Mayoites, on the other hand, never achieve a rudimentary self-awareness, but abjectly defer to a set of laws which they privately despise. Like hopeless provincials, they have no sense of their own presence. Christy's by-play with the mirror in the second act may be narcissistic, but it does serve to
frame
his face, raising it from a commonplace thing to the realms of self-reflexive art. The very
representation
of that face bestows on it an interest it would otherwise have lacked, the growth of consciousness in various characters being indicated in the repeated phrase of recognition "Is it me?" This is "the transformation which takes place in the subject when he assumes an image"
52
. . . like those Aran Islanders who, contemplating Synge's photographs, saw themselves as if for the first time.
The perfect mirror in
The Playboy
points forward to that moment when Christy will form a conception of himself, rather than existing as a conception of others. This is the first act in any revolutionary agenda, a moment reminiscent of that when an insurgent Mexican peasantry
broke into the great houses of landowners to be stunned at the sight of their entire bodies in the vast mirrors.
Until this point, Christy has been repeatedly described as one who is afraid of his own shadow, that shadow which is emblematic of his hidden potential, the dark, repressed aspects of himself: but he proceeds from that fear to active self-reflection in the mirror during the second act. This is, as yet, a somewhat superficial activity, an adolescent contemplation of
ego rather than of self, but it nonetheless provides the means from which the self may finally be inferred. It is the psychological version, within the individual, of that rather revivalist form of nationalism which is self-conscious but not self-aware. Knowledge of the self rather than mere ego would be the personal version of liberation: and even as nationalism is a phase which a community must pass through
en route
to liberation, so the ego is an essential precondition for the revelation of self. If whole peoples can mistake nationalism for liberation, so there are egos which demand to be identified totally with the self, such as the inflated ego of Christy in Act Two. Equally, there are others which identify solely with the shadow side, persistently asserting their unworthiness, the self-loathing Christy of Act One.
Integration can finally be achieved only by those who admit both positive and negative sides as authentic elements.
53
Those, like Christy, who start with the shadow-side, are more likely to reach this terminus than those who blissfully bask, without reflection, in the ego-image of the perfect mirror. Worshippers of ego, lacking the critical capacity, become prisoners of their own impulses, whereas those who reflect on ego attain objective insights into their dark side and that of others. They learn, as Christy does, that the shadow of which they are initially afraid, is the mirror of an opposite within, the Yeatsian
antiself,
a set of elements all the more powerful for having been repressed. The ego is the mirror of the superficial person. Christy as a mirror-self in the first half of the play was like all mirrors lacking any image of
himself
with the consequence that when an image showed in his mirror, it was the image of another's desire. By degrees, however, he moves from that passive state to one of active self-reflection, and so his behaviour is progressively less impulse-ridden and more deliberated: by the end, indeed, he can proclaim himself master of those forces which have been mastering him.
In Act One, Christy speaks prose, a prose which befits the frightened boy he is. In the next act, he perfects a factitious lingo, too flowery and exotic to be true: "It's her like is fined to be handling merchandise in the heavens above".
54
This is derided as "poetry talk" by the Widow
Quin, who sees in it a falsely idealized account of "a girl you'd see itching and scratching, and she with a stale stink of poteen on her from selling in the shop". Such poetry talk is the interesting equivalent of the black-is-beautiful poetry of
négritude,
cultivated among the writers of
Martinique in the 1940s. Fanon and Césaire were later to conclude that such exotic nativism was no final solution: and, in like manner, at the close of Act Three, Christy repudiates his former lyricism for an altogether more terse and telling language. He turns to the woman who had so recently loved him, but who now lights the sod to burn his leg, and on this occasion he offers no flowery speeches: "That's your kind, is it?"
55
After early Yeatsian
eloquence, late Yeatsian terseness. After revivalist baroque, Joyce's style of scrupulous meanness, his dignified assertion of a people's right to be colourless. After nationalism, liberation.
Synge is arguably the most gifted Irish exponent of the three phases of artistic decolonization later described by Fanon. He effortlessly assimilated the culture of the occupying English and men proceeded to immerse himself in the native culture. Fanon's warning about the pitfalls of national consciousness is worth quoting at this point:
The native intellectual who comes back to his people by way of cultural achievements behaves in fact like a foreigner. Sometimes, he has no hesitation in using a dialect in order to show his will to be as near as possible to the people . . . The culture that the intellectual leans towards is often no more than a stock of particularisms. He wishes to attach himself to the people; but instead he only catches hold of their outer garments.
56
This, or something very like it, has long been the nationalist description of Synge, to be found most recently in the account of Seamus Deane: but it is, of course, a description of the Christy of the second act. Unlike that Christy, however, Synge does catch hold of a great deal more than the outer garments of a folk culture: and he never behaves like a foreigner. In the history of Irish writing, he more than any other artist exposed the ways in which a torrent of "exotic" talk may be poor compensation for a failure to act. Denounced as a
stage-Irish exaggeration,
The Playboy
actually offers a sharp critique of the verbal exaggeration associated with the stereotype. The play's counterpoising of fine words and failed action makes it a caustic study of the fatal Irish gift of the gab. It was a measure of Synge's own artistic maturity that he could satirize his own great gift even as he exploited it most fully. In
The Playboy
his art reached such a pitch of sophistication that it could
even raise doubts about the medium through which those doubts were expressed.
The only stage-Irish scenes enacted on the night of the riots were performed by the protesters in the pit. Synge himself claimed in an essay that the Abbey Theatre had "contrived by its care and taste to put an end to the reaction against the careless Irish humour of which everyone has had too much".
57
That sentence broke out of the Anglo-Irish antithesis by shrewdly implying a criticism of both the colonialist stereotype and the nationalist reaction to it. In his own art, Synge wonderfully fused what was best in English and Gaelic tradition, often doing this within a single work, as in the short satire against the women who hated
The Playboy:
Lord, confound this surly sister,
Blight her brow with blotch and blister;
Cramp her larynx, lung, and liver,
In her guts a galling give her.
Let her live to earn her dinners
In Mountjoy with seedy sinners.
Lord, this judgement quickly bring,
And I'm your servant, J. M. Synge.
58
The poem is in octosyllabic couplets, which Swift said were most suited to pungent, alliterative satire: but
the
notion of raising blisters on the brow of one who has spurned the writer's art is taken from Gaelic bards, who resorted to alliteration in such performances. So blended, the two traditions amount to something more than the sum of their parts, constituting – like the bilingual weave of Hiberno-English – a third term.
Synge's
Playboy,
a product of similar blending, was a sort of blueprint for a new species of Irish artist. In his hands, the meaning of Gaelic tradition changed from something museumized to something modifiable, endlessly open. He sensed that the revivalists' worship of the past was based on their questionable desire to colonize and control it: but his deepest desire was to demonstrate the continuing power of the radical Gaelic past to disrupt the revivalist present. In the play, after all, Christy not only fails to kill his father but decides in the end that he doesn't even want to: it is enough to know that the old man is now happily tractable to the son's future designs. This play is the "seething pot", into which Syngc cast the shards of threatened Irish traditions, out of which the learning of the future might emerge.
59
In that context,
it is hardly surprising that, decades after its first production, it should have been almost effortlessly translated into a Trinidadian version by
Mustafa Matura under the revised tide
The
Playboy of the West Indies.