Abstract
Lachman traces the theme of migration of the human self through material and spiritual reality in W.B. Yeats’s drama. He analyses Yeats’s protagonists as human artefacts shaped and reshaped by an intensive deformation of the body often presented at a moment of erotic ecstasy. On the one hand, Lachman shows Yeatsian character as a perfect representative of the modernist epoch; on the other hand, he stresses the distanced, colonial mode of Yeats’s writing, which results from the playwright’s precarious position within the local tradition of Irish literature. Then, Lachman moves on to present J.M. Synge as a critical representative of European philosophy and art who undertakes the task of exploring native Irish communities through a network of culturally specific concepts. Synge’s early documentary work, The Aran Islands, offers a vision of a utopian idyll of a perfect Irish society, while in his dramatic works he presents a tragic, or tragicomic, vision of failed social rebellions. Lachman argues that in his drama Synge narrates the story of Irish revivalist nationalism by ironically scrutinising its rural population through figures of vagabond, travelling social outcasts. Finally, Lachman claims that S. O’Casey’s drama offers perhaps the most bitter and biting criticism of both Catholic, nationalistic ideology of the Irish Free State and of the Marxist utopia of political reform. The chapter attempts to show how ruthless logic of historical determination dominates a character’s life and how individual protagonists either fail to confront it or—more rarely—heroically oppose it.
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Notes
- 1.
As Postlewait claims, the avant-garde theatre of the day “exploited the theatre’s stageness” (Postlewait and Davis 2003, 12) as a reaction to the superficial realism of the well-made play.
- 2.
Puchner claims that most fundamental reforms in Yeats’s , Brecht’s , and Beckett’s drama were “derived from the return of anti-theatricality to the stage” (2002, 120).
- 3.
Peter Szondi was of the opinion that “the crisis of Drama was caused by the expulsion of people out of interpersonal spaces into isolation” (1983, 57).
- 4.
Irina Ruppo Malone traces in great detail the inspiration that early Irish drama drew from Ibsen’s plays. Especially, the theme of both Synge’s and O’Casey’ s criticism of “harmful idealism” offers a productive argument for the analysis of their plays (2010, 5).
- 5.
The plot of the first part of The Road To Damascus completes a circle and shows life as a cycle of repetitions. Among other things it may be the influence of Kierkegaard’s Repetition, a study that Strindberg might have known (Ollén 2005, 17).
- 6.
His dilemma may actually also reflect Yeats’s artistic attempt, for Maeterlinck experimented with ways of “resolving the tension between the spiritual vision of the poet and the physical world of the theatre and actor ” (Carlson 1984, 296).
- 7.
Wilson stresses that for Yeats the limitation of perception only to the five sense equaled “spiritual death” (1958, 18).
- 8.
O’Brien calls Yeats a “gentle Nietzschean” at his earlier stage of interest with the German philosopher’s work. At the later stage, Yeats became more fierce in views on the matter (1972, 73).
- 9.
Cf. McAteer connects his interpretation of such plays as The Only Jealousy of Emer with the crisis of culture ensuing after World War I (2010, 7).
- 10.
The theme of the objective, oppressive form is an important topic for Yeats who was strongly opposed to the “subjection of the interior life to external, objective form ” (McAteer 2010, 102).
- 11.
This tendency explored by Yeats in his literary writing was naturally also rendered in a philosophical, visionary form in his major work A Vision. The general dynamics of movement towards unity was based on the centripetal and centrifugal opposition of forces of unifying and dispersing character that balance “towards the One and towards the Many ” (Mann 2012, 5). These dynamics characterise the general movement presented in A Vision.
- 12.
The self-sufficient quality of personality produced “joyous” experience and was inspired by Yeats’s reading of The Upanishads (Wilson 1958, 21–2).
- 13.
This “dreaming back” experienced by souls desiring the return to their previous existence was connected with Yeats’s wide interests in the occult, and also evident in some passages in A Vision (Roche 2015, 51).
- 14.
For an analysis of Yeats’s thinking about “material culture” in his late plays especially in reference to the image of the severed head, see Paige Reynolds (2015).
- 15.
Yeats was greatly inspired by Strindberg and his idea of anti-realistic theatre based on “abstract gestures of opera and old tragedies ” (Strindberg 2007a, 167). It was supposed to be—similarly to Yeats’s ideal—an intimate theatre with no “calculated effect” and no “places for applause ” (Strindberg 2007b, 127).
- 16.
As Luc Ferry observes, the decomposition of the ideal, classical concept of the world was prepared by the nineteenth-century philosophy and it virtually produced a “new age” in which “individualism adapts itself to the disappearance of subject and object and their replacement by a pure perspectivism, by an absolute dispersal of the various points of view in a radical historicism” (1993, 171).
- 17.
McAteer sees her as an example of “fetishism of the commodity” and as an effect of the “impact of reification in modern Europe ” (McAteer 2010, 96).
- 18.
Yeats saw the original productions of Wilde’s Salome (in 1905 and 1906), which had a deep impact on his writing clearly visible in such plays as On Baile’s Strand, Four Plays for Dancers, and A Full Moon in March (Doody 2001, 48–49).
- 19.
Bertha thinks that Yeats’s protagonists are “concrete yet entirely impersonal images of the sublimely pure and the lowly, gross material” (1993, 33).
- 20.
As Wilson observes, it is an ironic image of folk culture mirroring the serious action of the play in which “heaven is no heaven until it has been fertilized by its opposite” (1958, 92).
- 21.
Yeats often represented “revolutionary individualism” contrasted with “collective energies” or “crowd mentality” that indicated a growing presence of mass culture (2010, 79).
- 22.
As Paige Reynolds observes, the helmet symbolises “obdurate materiality”, and it “confirms Yeats’s disdain for the material by focusing on its capacity to upset and corrupt” (2015, 443).
- 23.
Yeats’s fascination with Nietzsche is reflected in his notes to the philosopher’s works (O’Brien 1972, 68).
- 24.
In this sense, Yeats’s drama can be seen as a reworking of an “ethnic cliché” that is the late nineteenth-century perception of Celtic people as “otherworldly, removed from practicality, gifted with second sight and mystically sensitive ” (Leerssen 2004, 49). Yeats decomposes the individual elements of this cultural construct and reassembles them again as marked artefacts.
- 25.
Some masks in Yeats’s plays indicate the “fixity of the self” as in At the Hawk’s Well ; some the “fluidity of the self” as in The Only Jealousy (Worth 1986, 166).
- 26.
Therefore, I principally disagree with a more common notion that a mask in Yeats’s drama indicates the doubling of identity (Shaughnessy 1984).
- 27.
Yeats’s uneasy attitude to naturalism is perhaps best expressed in his mixed feelings about Henrik Ibsen’s drama, whose work and style he both admired and loathed (Cf. Ruppo 2010, esp. chapter “The inconsistent Ibsenism of W.B. Yeats , 1902–6”: 38–50).
- 28.
Yeats admired Villiers de l’Isle Adam’s Axel for creating “persons from whom has fallen all even of personal characteristic ” (2007c, 139, cf. Doody 2001, 51). He also refers to Maeterlinck , who presents his characters as “faint souls” or “shadows”, and he speaks of some French painters who with “subtle rhythms of colours and of form have overcome the clear outline of things as we see them ” (Yeats 2007c, 140).
- 29.
For the connection between Walter Pater and modernism , see Sarbu (1993, 24–25).
- 30.
His realistic stage designs function as a stable basis for action, for as he said “companionship can only be perfect when it is founded on things, for things are always the same under the hand” (Yeats 1962a, 22).
- 31.
Doody stresses that Yeats’s characters develop a “new and mystic language system” and “access some apprehension of transcendent knowledge” (2001, 55).
- 32.
As Maeterlinck suggested, contemplation and trance can be ways of engaging with the reality beyond the senses and their limited vision. Yeats thus postulated the need for suspending human will. One can stay in a “real trance” under the condition that “the mind is liberated from the pressure of the will ” (Yeats 2007e, 117). Soul comes close to the symbolic reality when “deep meditation has withdrawn it from every impulse but its own ” (Yeats 2007e, 119).
- 33.
Paige Reynolds sees in the image of the severed head an “object that productively placed contraries in dialogue, forging links between subject and object, spiritual and material, as well as between disparate cultures and historical periods” (2015, 445).
- 34.
Marvin Carlson argues that in some of Yeats’s characters one can find elements of the superhuman connected with his concept of anima mundi (1984, 305).
- 35.
- 36.
He signed some of his private letters, to Molly Allgood, written from Germany as “Tramp” and “Tramper” (McCormack 2000, 118).
- 37.
In his comments to The Aran Islands , Synge stresses explicitly the effort of keeping faith to all the factual details that he recorded while living on the islands. The pledge to stay as faithful as possible to the recorded facts bears resemblance to the naturalistic imperative of using authentic materials. The strategy could be called “symbolic appropriation” (Bogucki 2010, 522). Anthony Roche summarises the “authenticity debate” of Synge’s writing, by saying: “his plays are not an unmediated reflection of social reality but a self-consciously constructed dramatic effect” (2013, loc. 166).
- 38.
Declan Kiberd makes a comparison between Malinowski and Synge , pointing out that both The Aran Islands and Malinowski’s accounts of his ethnographic research in the Western Pacific offer a stylistic mixture of “documentary field notes” and a “personal diary” (2000, 104, 107).
- 39.
Clifford stresses the importance of writing as an activity of sense- and image-making potential: “ethnographic comprehension […] is better seen as a creation of ethnographic writing than a consistent quality of ethnographic experience” (italics in original, 1988, 110).
- 40.
Castle , in his anthropological reading of the Celtic Revival and modernism, stresses the fact that both Yeats and Synge were obsessed with the idea of authenticity of their interest in Irish culture and identity. Their attitudes—as members of the Protestant Ascendency—were coloured with a conscious “adoption of Ireland as homeland” (8). This explains a lot of subversive, critical irony which both of these playwrights champion as a method of presentation.
- 41.
Declan Kiberd refers to the flâneur and to the distanced, intellectual participation but claims that Synge’s presence either in Paris or in the Aran Islands was different to what Benjamin understood by the concept (2000, 87).
- 42.
It echoes some of Matthew Arnold’s ideas about the spiritual superiority of Celtic culture over philistine, middle-class civilisation. Naturally, Synge was far more competent to pass judgement on Irish people having first-hand experience of the life in the West of Ireland. On Synge’s polemics with Arnoldian visions of the Celts, see King (2004, 84, 86).
- 43.
As Castle observes, this “long-term immersion” in the native life on the islands, gave him an “ethnographic authority” for the imaginative “rejection of the urban centers of Europe” (2001, 141).
- 44.
- 45.
This is how Bradbury describes the sensations of a person living in a modernist city, which he sees as the “frontiers of experience” (1991, 97).
- 46.
Declan Kiberd calls Synge’s and Orwell’s works “left-wing pastorals” (2000, 85).
- 47.
Cf. Shawn Gillen who agrees with other critics in saying that as an example of creative non-fiction Synge’s account “should be read as an early masterpiece of the genre” (2007, 129).
- 48.
In Riders to the Sea , one can identify elements of the ancient tragedy along with inspirations drawn from Shakespeare ; there are similarities with the works of Sophocles and with Milton (Grene 1975, 56).
- 49.
- 50.
As a distinctively solitary character, Maurya stands at a beginning of a long line of Irish women tortured by loss and voicing the nation’s fate. Tom Murphy’s Bailegangaire (1985) presents a solitary old woman, telling grotesque, unfinished stories to her daughters. It is an ironic comment on Synge’s , as well as Yeats’s and Lady Gregory’s ( Cathleen ni Houlihan ) images of Ireland visualised as women (Grene 1999, 227–231).
- 51.
Nicholas Grene calls them “unhappy comedies” (1975, 146–60).
- 52.
Grene connects the changing of the setting of the comedies from the Aran Islands to Wicklow and Kerry with their critical and bitter vision of Irish society (1975, 41).
- 53.
For a more detailed discussion on the relation between Synge and Shaw , see Murray (1997, 81–2).
- 54.
- 55.
As a vagabond, a figure disconnected from social and personal constraints, staying in an intimate touch with nature, the Tramp may offer a different reading of the situation, paint it in different colours. So the Tramp, as Anthony Roche observes, “verbally transforms the material conditions of the natural environment into a fine imaginative prospect”. Ultimately, as Roche puts it “the Tramp is more than a vehicle by which the psychological and social truths underlying the folktale are laid bare; he plays and active part in their deconstruction” (2013, 165–6).
- 56.
Synge is known for his interest in and appreciation of pre-modern literary and aesthetic ideas proposed by such writers as Walter Pater , Oscar Wilde , Gustave Flaubert and Charles Baudelaire (Kiberd 2000, 80).
- 57.
Nicholas Grene points to the fact that both Yeats and Synge reached deeper into Irish culture “seeking below the surfaces of Catholic Christian belief, a pagan substratum that was primal, deeper, truer” (1999, 264).
- 58.
Anthony Roche elaborates on the opposition between Christianity and Paganism. He sees significant differences in the representations of these two worldviews by Synge (2013, chapter 1). Yet, my argument remains that no matter how differently the two are represented, they are comparable in terms of their lack of spiritual depth.
- 59.
Canetti was writing about the pack as a social unit organising itself in a “state of excitement” and “obsessed with the same goals” (1978, 93).
- 60.
It is generally assumed that Philly and Jimmy, the secondary characters in the play who follow the general flow of emotions and action, make up the “crowd”. They stand for a more universal principle in the play and dramatise what Skelton calls the “voices of the crowd” and the “collective feeling” (1971, 125).
- 61.
For a more detailed discussion on the female and male protagonists in Synge’s drama, see King (2004, 79–92, 85–86).
- 62.
Synge undertakes what Castle calls “cultural translation”, which requires a “performative mode of redress” (2001, 148).
- 63.
Anthony Roche’s recent interpretation of Pegeen’s role at the end of the play would suggest that she benefitted from knowing Christy in growing rebellious against her own father, and in intending to remain so after the departure of the romantic lover. Roche sees in her an “unmanageable revolutionary”, who will not be cured and will in some way cultivate her opposition to the static social order (2015, 75). I find this argument unconvincing. Her final words—“I’ve lost the only Playboy of the Western World”—sound as a final seal of despair. Also, her now certain and swift marriage to Shaun Keogh represents an official and holy pledge of truce between her and local patriarchy.
- 64.
For instance, Skelton , elaborates on the similarities between Synge’s protagonist and the figure of Don Quixote. He also makes comparisons to a messianic figure (1971, 117, 120).
- 65.
Experimental plays by O’Casey engage with European playwriting: “The Silver Tassie creates a kind of bridge between the small but active stage of the ‘provincial’ Abbey Theatre and the large and varied stage of the European theatre. In its complexity of content and form, The Silver Tassie throws O’Casey into the main stream of the experimental theatre, more precisely, in the Modernist movement ” (Albino 2013).
- 66.
- 67.
For avant-garde, modernist elements in O’Casey’s drama , see Albino (2013).
- 68.
In a general sense, O’Casey’s trilogy could be read as an image of characters trapped between “disillusionment” and “delusion ” (McDonald 2004, 136–149).
- 69.
This is how O’Casey literally depicts what critics called “‘common-sense’ humanity”, that is, the human ethical stance which transgresses nationalistic, political, social or economic divisions within Irish society (McDonald 2002, 91).
- 70.
Kiberd thinks that O’Casey’s plays show “the tragedy of the entire social class” (1996, 237).
- 71.
In O’Casey’s drama, there is a consistent pattern of “interplay between the farcical and the serious” which abounds with “overtones of anguish under the farce ” (Krause 1970, 9).
- 72.
Thus, Schrank sees The Shadow as a play composed of “small dramas of temporal evasions” in which O’Casey stages “failed attempts at transcendence” (1993, 55).
- 73.
In his criticism of both socialism and nationalism, O’Casey depicts “harmful idealism” of all political, reformatory doctrines. Such criticism, to a large extent, characterised Irish revivalists’ attitude to Ibsenian drama (Ruppo 2010, 5).
- 74.
The non-realism could also be seen as the incursion of the fantastic, for as Bertha suggests in her in-depth study of the fantastic in Irish drama, O’Casey’s characters “are usually divided by their relation to the fantastic: those who prefer the world of fantasy to mundane reality are more sympathetic than grey, earth-bound, unimaginative people around them” (1993, 35).
- 75.
As McDonald observes, O’Casey uses the mythical elements in the trilogy, which “leaves the way open for an intrusion of indeterminate, impersonal historical forces” (2002, 94).
- 76.
Cf. the following line: “A graveyard where th’ dead are all above th’ ground ” (O’Casey 1967a, 186).
- 77.
Ayling sees in the second act of The Silver Tassie the “liturgical structure” that is present in the “antithetical pattern of responses” (1976, 41).
- 78.
Zeiss sees in this dispersal of the play’s protagonist a “generalized symbol of man” who is “drawn into the anonymous mass of the war-effort” (1984, 173).
- 79.
Expressionism had a decisive social agenda: “The expressionistic rebellions contained impulses towards the fulfillment and spiritual realization of the individual combined with revolts against repressive socio-cultural conditions ” (Kellner 1988a, 13).
- 80.
As O’Casey informs in “The Author’s Note”, the idea of the gate and the curtain was taken from Morning Becomes Electra (1952b, 114).
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Lachman, M. (2018). Social Man. In: Performing Character in Modern Irish Drama. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76535-8_2
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