Pampooties and Keening: Alternate Ways of Performing Memory in J. M. Synge’s Plays

Abstract

During his Parisian stays in the 1890s Synge studiedcultural anthropology at the Sorbonne and, as has been noted by critics, ‘the methodology he learnt there “took”’^l and left traces on his own writing. While sojourning on the Aran Islands, he consigned everything he saw and heard to notebooks which he then reworked into a narrative partaking of the travelogue, the autobiography and ethnographical recording. This was The Aran Islands, which became in turn the basis for most of his plays. In the introductions or prefaces to his works, Synge repeatedly proclaims the truthfulness of his account and transcription of Irish country people’s cultural practices and manners of speaking.² His emphatically insisting on ‘inventing nothing, and changing nothing’³ contributes to affirming the transparency of his position as an observer. In his essay ‘John Millington Synge and the Ireland of His Time’ W. B. Yeats remarks on Synge’s qualities of observation, which he qualifies as ‘long unmeditative watching’. He also underlines Synge’s desire for transparency or invisibility: ‘He told me once that when he lived in some peasant’s house, he tried to make those about him forget that he was there, and it is certain that he was silent in any crowded room.’⁴ This desire for self-erasure is very perceptible in The Aran Islands, even though it constantly conflicts with an equally strong desire to establish some form of intimate rapport with the islanders.⁵