Abstract
Looking at Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, I seek to challenge the view according to which the play resorts to violent images in order to stigmatise traditional, non-modern performative practices (Pilkington) and thus endorses the Abbey’s modernising agenda. Using Žižek’s concept of “systemic violence,” I suggest instead that the attitude shown in this play to modernity is ambivalent, and that while images of archaic forms of violence abound in the text of the play, what is exposed theatrically in the culminating scene of Christy’s Passion, when he is tortured and nearly hanged by an angry mob acting as the long arm of the law, is the normally invisible violence of the institutions of the modern state.
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Notes
- 1.
Synge, Complete Works, Vol. III, 222, quoted in Richards, “The Playboy of the Western World,” 30.
- 2.
Yeats, “Synge and the Ireland of his Time,” 172.
- 3.
“A name,” as Denis Johnston points out, “pronounced as if almost of one syllable, Maan.” Johnston, John Millington Synge, 34, quoted in Roche, Synge.
- 4.
Landmark contributions include MacLean, “The Hero as Playboy”; Pearce, “Synge’s Playboy as Mock-Christ”; Sultan, “The Gospel According to Synge” and “A Joycean look at The Playboy of the Western World”; Skelton, The Writings of J. M. Synge; Linksold, “Synge’s Christy”; Bretherton, “A Carnival Christy”; Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 166–67; Roche, Synge.
- 5.
Sultan, “A Joycean look,” 54.
- 6.
Bretherton, “A Carnival Christy,” 323.
- 7.
Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 167.
- 8.
Sullivan, “Synge, Sophocles and the Un-Making of Myth.”
- 9.
Sidnell, “Synge’s Playboy and the Champion of Ulster” and Kiberd, Synge and the Irish Language, 118.
- 10.
Kiberd, “The Frenzy of Christy.”
- 11.
O’Brien Johnson, Synge: The Medieval and the Grotesque, 66.
- 12.
Devlin, “The Source of Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World.”
- 13.
Roche, Synge.
- 14.
A notable exception is Nicholas Grene, who can find “no evidence that Synge intended to parody any of the figures suggested, Christ, Cuchullain or Oedipus.” Grene, Synge, 133.
- 15.
Pilkington, Theatre and Ireland, 44.
- 16.
Žižek, Violence, 1–2.
- 17.
Lloyd, Ireland After History, 3–4. Emphasis mine.
- 18.
Synge, The Playboy of the Western World, in The Playboy of the Western World and Other Plays, 144. All further references to The Playboy of the Western World are to this edition and will be indicated parenthetically.
- 19.
I borrow this term from Luke Gibbons who (in the context of Playboy) mentions “the process of ‘disenchantment’ which, according to Max Weber, ushers in the legal-rational system of a developing capitalist economy.” Gibbons, Transformations, 34.
- 20.
On these aspects see in particular Gibbons, “Coming Out of Hibernation? The Myth of Modernization in Irish Culture” and “Identity Without a Centre: Identity, Allegory and Irish Nationalism” in Transformations, 82–93 and 134–47; Phelan, “The Advent of Modern Irish Drama” and Lloyd, Irish Culture and Colonial Modernity.
- 21.
Pilkington, Theatre and Ireland, 46. As he points out, “mention of animal maiming . . . served as a reminder that such acts still occurred in disputes between tenants and landlords and had been a feature of the conflict between graziers and tenants in the early 1900s.” (46)
- 22.
On the connection of violence and poetry in Playboy see Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 169–70.
- 23.
Gibbons, Transformations in Irish Culture, 136.
- 24.
Richards, “The Playboy of the Western World,” 32.
- 25.
Synge, The Aran Islands, 283, quoted in Gibbons, Transformations, 30.
- 26.
Richards, “The Playboy of the Western World,” 33.
- 27.
Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 167.
- 28.
Pearse, “Synge’s Playboy as Mock-Christ,” 91.
- 29.
Roche, Synge.
- 30.
Ibid.
- 31.
Ibid.
- 32.
Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 169.
- 33.
Lyotard, Inhuman, 1–7.
- 34.
Lyotard, Inhuman, 7.
- 35.
Lecossois, “‘Groaning wicked.’”
- 36.
This is not to say that the play is actually naturalistic, only that it endorses naturalism’s assumption that the function of modern theatre is to reveal the “naked truth” of social reality. On this question see Poulain, “Synge and Tom Murphy”.
- 37.
Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 175.
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Poulain, A. (2016). “Unseen Forms of Violence”: J. M. Synge and the Playboy of the Modern World. In: Irish Drama, Modernity and the Passion Play. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-94963-2_2
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