Theatre and residual culture: j.m. synge and pre-christian ireland 1st edition christopher collins (
Theatre and Residual Culture: J.M. Synge and Pre-Christian Ireland 1st Edition Christopher Collins (Auth.)
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Cover image: “Tinker’s Tree” Photograph by William Collins
Printed on acid-free paper
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature The registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. London
For Lesley Collins and Desmond Collins, who taught me to treat the two imposters, just the same.
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book would not have been possible without the generous financial assistance provided by the University of Dublin, Trinity College. I am grateful for the following awards: the Postgraduate Research Studentship (2008–11), the Trinity College Dublin Travel Grant (2010), the Creative Arts, Technologies and Cultures Award (2011) and the Samuel Beckett Postgraduate Studentship awarded by the Department of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht/An Roinn Ealaíon, Oidhreachta agus Gaeltachta and the Visual and Performing Arts Fund, Trinity College Dublin (2012).
I am grateful to the various Keepers of Manuscripts at the Berg Collection and Foster-Murphy Collection in the New York Public Library, the Royal Irish Academy, the National Library of Ireland, the Irish Folklore Commission and, above all, the Keepers of Manuscripts at Trinity College Dublin.
I am thankful to my colleagues and students at the Department of Drama, Trinity College Dublin, for their invaluable support in helping me think through the research presented in this book. I would like to offer my deepest thanks to Melissa Sihra who encouraged me to research Synge’s plays and performances, Ben Murnane and Paul Murphy for their unswerving critical insight, and to Brian Singleton and Anthony Roche who encouraged me to write this book.
Thank you to my Editors at Palgrave Macmillan, Jen McCall and April James, for your continued support.
Thank you to Nicholas and Emily Johnson, Justin and Jane MacGregor, James Hickson, Rhona Greene, Ann Mulligan, Hugh Denard, Mary P. Caulfield, Gabriel Graham, Margaret, Tom, and Michael Roche, Eibhlin
and Peter Colgan, Deirdre and John Heath, Shane O’Reilly, Paul Curley and, who could forget? Jack Jeffery.
Thank you to two dear members of my family—William and Hannah Collins—for all of your love and support. William: thank you very much for the cover image for this book.
The real driving force behind the writing of this book has been Céline Lehmann. Even when I didn’t believe in myself, you always believed in me. Thank you for being my guiding light.
My final acknowledgement is to my parents: Lesley and Desmond Collins. This book is for you.
November 2015 Christopher Collins
Trinity College Dublin Dublin, Ireland
A BBREVIATIONS
NOTE: ALL QUOTATIONS FROM MANUSCRIPT COLLECTIONS, SYNGE’S COLLECTED WORKS AND COLLECTED LETTERS
PRESERVE ORIGINAL SPELLING.
CL, vol. 1 Synge, J.M. The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge. Vol. 1, 1871–1907. Edited by Ann Saddlemyer. Oxford: Clarendon, 1983.
CL, vol. 2 Synge, J.M. The Collected Letters of John Millington Synge. Vol. 2, 1907–1909. Edited by Ann Saddlemyer. Oxford: Clarendon, 1984.
CW, vol. 1 Synge, J.M. Collected Works. Vol. 1, Poems. Edited by Robin Skelton. London: Oxford University Press, 1962.
CW, vol. 2 Synge, J.M. Collected Works. Vol. 2, Prose. Edited by Alan Price. London: Oxford University Press, 1966.
CW, vol. 3 Synge, J.M. Collected Works. Vol. 3, Plays, Book 1. Edited by Ann Saddlemyer. London: Oxford University Press, 1968.
CW, vol. 4 Synge, J.M. Collected Works. Vol. 4, Plays, Book 2. Edited by Ann Saddlemyer. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 1982.
IFC MS Irish Folklore Commission Manuscript.
NLI MS National Library of Ireland Manuscript.
NYPL MS The New York Public Library Manuscript.
RIA MS Royal Irish Academy Manuscript.
TCD ASMS The Letters of the Reverend Alexander Synge, June 1851–December 1852.
TCD CMS The Synge Correspondence Manuscripts from the Library of Trinity College Dublin.
TCD JJP The Papers of Prof. John Joly from the Library of Trinity College Dublin.
TCD MS The Manuscripts of the Irish Literary Renaissance. The J.M. Synge Manuscripts from the Library of Trinity College Dublin.
TCD SSMS The Stephens-Synge Manuscripts from the Library of Trinity College Dublin.
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Theatre and Residual Culture
This book considers the cultural residue from pre-Christian Ireland in J.M. Synge’s plays and performances. Throughout, I will argue that Synge dramatized pre-Christian residual culture in order to critique the Catholic Church’s ideological stranglehold on history, religion and politics in the Ireland of Synge’s time. By dramatizing a pre-modern and pre-political residual culture in front of a predominantly modern and political IrishCatholic middle-class audience, I will maintain that Synge attempted to offer an alternative understanding of what it meant to be modern at the beginning of the twentieth century. In order to do this the book draws extensively on Synge’s unpublished diaries and notebooks to demonstrate how pre-Christian residual culture informed not just how he wrote, but also how he thought about an older, almost forgotten culture that Catholic Ireland desperately wanted to forget.
Synge scholarship has acknowledged the traces of pre-Christian Ireland in Synge’s works as such: Nicholas Grene points out that ‘Christianity is troubled by the deeply pagan emotion which Synge was always quick to detect beneath the surface of [the] Aran [Islands’] Catholicism’1; Declan Kiberd notes that Synge’s plays are informed by ‘a fiercely defiant paganism underneath a thin film of Christian belief’2; Mary C. King argues that ‘Christian and pagan beliefs, myths and rites collide and mingle’3 in Synge’s plays; and Anthony Roche observes ‘of all the creative oppositions to be found in John Millington Synge, none more fully unites the man, the Anglo-Irish culture into which he was born, and the native Irish
drama he did so much to bring into being than the opposition between Christianity and paganism’.4 However, no scholar has offered a monograph on the debt Synge owed to the cultural vestiges and traces of pre-Christian Ireland—until now.
This book provides analysis of Synge’s dramatization of the cultural residue of pre-Christian Ireland in six of his seven plays: In the Shadow of the Glen, 5 Riders to the Sea (1904),6 The Well of the Saints (1905),7 The Playboy of the Western World (1907),8 The Tinker’s Wedding (1909)9 and When the Moon Has Set (2002).10 Each play is considered in an individual chapter in order to identify how its dramaturgy was informed by a plethora of pre-Christian beliefs manifested as cultural beliefs of animism, pantheism, folklore, superstition and magical ritual, as well as local and national scandals that summoned the contemporaneity of pre-modern and pre-political beliefs and biographical events peculiar to Synge. Synge’s remaining unfinished play, Deirdre of the Sorrows (1910)11 is omitted from concentric analysis because it is set in pre-Christian Ireland proper, and therefore it is unable to engage with residual sensibilities for culture. Nevertheless, the play is discussed in this book in order to complement how the other six plays draw upon residual pre-Christian culture that was anathema to Catholic, bourgeois Ireland.
THEATRE AND RESIDUAL CULTURE
This book is indebted to Raymond Williams’s theory of cultural materialism, which foregrounds the importance of theatre and performance in rethinking cultural politics. Cultural materialism emphasises how the material manifestations of culture (such as theatre and performance) can have a very real impact on a society’s understanding of history, politics and economics. Williams’s theory of cultural materialism distinguishes between dominant, emergent and residual culture, and he is interested in how these three cultural formations have their own unique impact on history, politics and economics. What is the difference, then, between dominant, emergent and residual culture?
Dominant culture articulates cultural practice. In short, it is the dominant form of culture in any given society. Emergent culture is that which creates ‘new meanings and values, new practices, new significances and experiences’12 but still, a dominant culture is always alert to its emergence, and therefore it will quickly incorporate the emergent culture into cultural dialogue through the hegemonic process. The hegemonic process is the
struggle to achieve the ideological dominance of society. Hegemony is extremely subtle. It can be achieved without society being actively aware of the process. This is because, as Williams points out, hegemony ‘is a whole body of practices and expectations, over the whole of living: our senses and assignments of energy, our shaping perceptions of ourselves and our world. It is the lived system of meanings and values—constitutive and constituting—which as they are experienced as practices appear as reciprocally confirming’.13 Significantly, once a dominant culture achieves hegemony a society believes that ‘culture has always been like this’. Hegemony becomes the social reality. However, residual culture contains ‘experiences, meanings and values, which cannot be verified or cannot be expressed in terms of the dominant culture’.14 Accordingly, residual culture causes sincere problems for a dominant culture because it is counterhegemonic. As far as a dominant culture is concerned, residual culture is like an easily contracted virus; it can rapidly multiply and it can attack the dominant culture’s hegemonic control of society. This is why residual culture will always be policed by a dominant culture, because a residual culture has its own ideological structure with the potential to destabilize a dominant culture’s control on society. Furthermore, it is under a constant state of surveillance because residual culture directly questions dominant culture’s claim to be able to transcend historical conditions and create a universal truth that is fundamentally idealistic. However, universal truths do not exist; they are simply ideas and ideals. Residual culture challenges a dominant culture’s claim that “culture has always been like this”. What, then, is the relationship between the ideals and the materials of dominant culture, and society?
Every society, in the first instance, is structured with the material in mind: water, food and shelter comes first. The ideals come second: church, school, family, the law and, significantly, a cultural institution such as theatre. The relationship between the two is defined and controlled by a dominant culture within any given social formation. A dominant culture became dominant through the hegemonic process: by dominating the materials of society first, and then using ideology to control the ideals of society. Society might resist but ultimately, if a culture is to become dominant, it will appease any resistance through ideological control to achieve hegemony. Let me give an example. A dominant culture uses ideology to control, for example, the hegemonic ideal of a family. In turn this affects the material practices of a family: their shelter, their food, and so on, right down to the way that the family interacts with the world; for example, the
holidays they go on, or do not go on. As more families are incorporated into hegemony, the more a culture becomes dominant. And so, a dominant culture begins to create different structures, different hierarchies and ultimately different classes. This is why Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels advocated that ‘ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relations, the dominant material relations grasped as ideas.’15 As the dominant culture begins to assert dominance over everyday life politics, and ultimately history, come under its control as its understanding of common sense (senso commune: specific values and belief systems) permeates society. How the dominant culture does this is not just dependent on ideology, it is also dependent on economics. Economic changes affect cultural changes and vice versa. In this way, economics, ideology and culture are codependent. Capitalism creates huge divisions in material conditions, and therefore it creates huge divisions in the formation of ideology and, by degrees, it creates huge divisions in culture. However, there is one problem for a dominant capitalist culture: residual culture. In this way, a theatre of residual culture is a material event that has the potential to have an impact on society because it gathers people to watch a performance of a culture that has been disregarded and/or forgotten by society. In so doing, a theatre of residual culture is extremely counter-hegemonic because it questions how culture is conditioned by a societal understanding of politics, history and economics. Significantly, a theatre of residual culture also reminds society of the importance of recognizing the value of collective struggle in the face of ideological oppression.
J.M. Synge created a theatre of residual culture.
Williams’s concept of residual culture particularly concerns Synge’s dramatization of the material conditions of pre-Christian Ireland because the cultural residue from pre-Christian Ireland was counter-hegemonic. It is important to point out that although residual culture in Synge’s Ireland was associated with a pre-Christian past, its cultural manifestations had nothing to do with being archaic or out-of-date: residual culture was living history. As Williams points out,
the residual, by definition, has been effectively formed in the past, but it is still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present. Thus, certain experiences, meanings, and values which cannot be expressed or substantially verified in terms of the dominant culture, are nevertheless lived and practised on the basis of the residue—cultural as well as social—of some previous social and cultural institution or formation.16
The dominant culture in Synge’s Ireland was the Catholic middle classes. Historian Joseph Lee advocates that these classes were preoccupied ‘with legitimising their aspirations by invoking alleged precedents from the celtic [sic] mists’ and, furthermore, that this mercantile class were ‘far from being prisoners of the past, [but] modernisers [that] created the past in their image of the future’.17 The Catholic middle classes could not allow the cultural residue from pre-Christian Ireland to emerge within Catholic modernity because these ostensibly backward beliefs would destabilize the postcolonial project of state-orientated Nationalism; why should Ireland be granted independence from British rule if its populace demonstrated a logic that was supposedly backward? In a time of Darwinism, accelerated modernization and extensive support for National independence, any trace that linked the Irish populace to those cultures of Otherness within the Empire was an ideological index for heathendom, and therefore it was anathema to bourgeois dominant culture. However, the residual culture of pre-Christian Ireland couldn’t simply disappear and, in the Ireland of Synge’s time, there was a very real danger that pre-Christian residual culture would become an emergent culture through artistic practice. For example, W.B. Yeats attempted to incorporate the pre-Christian cultural residue into cultural hegemony through collecting folklore and writing poetry and plays on pre-Christian themes. However, highly conservative members of Catholic Ireland flatly refused for any pre-Christian beliefs to appear in their dominant culture. In 1900, the staunch Catholic D.P. Moran would write of Yeats that he ‘does not understand us, and he has yet to write even one line that will strike a chord of the Irish heart. He dreams dreams. They may be very beautiful and “Celtic”, but they are not ours’.18 Moran’s stance towards residual is culture is unsurprising. The umbilical cord that connected Catholic Ireland to anything remotely indicative of pre-Christian materialism had to be snipped. Theatre and residual culture in Synge’s Ireland questioned the bourgeois, Catholic, dominant culture’s claim to transcend historical conditions. Consequently, it also questioned the Irish citizen’s adherence to Roman orthodoxy and the supposed fact that culture ‘had always been like this’. It had not, and Synge’s theatre of residual culture tackled dominant culture head on.
Performing residual culture is very much dependent on performing residual history. The material manifestation of pre-Christian residual history in Synge’s Ireland was through the practicing of beliefs, customs and traditions. Williams reminds us that tradition ‘has been commonly understood as a relatively inert, historicized segment of a social structure: tradition as the
surviving past.’19 Performing residual history in the present has considerable power because it reminds the spectator that history is just a cyclical narrative that has been suppressed by a dominant culture. Williams points out that ‘tradition is in practice the most evident expression of the dominant and hegemonic pressures and limits’.20 It is important then, that a dominant culture must view tradition ideologically through a process that Williams calls selective tradition:
an effective dominant culture, is always passed off as ‘the tradition’, ‘the significant past’. But always the selectivity is the point; the way in which from a whole possible area of past and present, certain meanings and practices are chosen for emphasis, certain other meanings and practices are neglected and excluded. Even more crucially, some of these meanings and practices are reinterpreted, diluted, or put into forms which support or at least do not contradict other elements within the effective dominant culture.21
Synge’s theatre of residual culture presented the spectator with preChristian traditions that offered an alternative history of religion and politics in Catholic Ireland. In staging residual history Synge’s traditions were very much counter-hegemonic and, as Williams points out, ‘it is significant that much of the most accessible and influential work of the counterhegemony is historical: the recovery of discarded ideas’.22 Synge’s staging of residual history critiqued the narrative of progressive Catholic history. In so doing Synge’s residual cultural histories offered an alternative understanding of politics and progress in early-twentieth century Ireland and ultimately, as I will go on to explain, an alternative understanding of modernity.
A ‘dramatist is not a historian’23 Yeats maintained, and Synge’s biographer, W.J. McCormack, also advocates that ‘Synge never evolved, nor was he possessed by, a philosophy of history’.24 This book refutes these hypotheses. Synge was a historian: ‘your uncle’, wrote Samuel Synge (Synge’s younger brother) to his daughter (Edith), ‘did not care to read books of history, but preferred to read the original letters or records if possible’, and when asked about historical narrative ‘he replied that [it] was probably wrong’.25 In an unpublished essay “Historical or Peasant Drama” Synge offered his sentiments on history plays:
The moment the sense of historical fiction awoke in Europe, historical fiction became impossible. For a time it seemed otherwise. Antiquarian writers,
fools now exploded […] Hence Hist. Fiction insincere. It is possible to use a national tradition a century or more old which is still alive in the soul of the people […] It is impossible to use a legend [such] as Faust which from the outset defies historical reality—in the making up of an absolutely modern work […] You cannot gather grapes of chimney pots.26
In the Ireland of Synge’s time, the Catholic Church underwent a process of modernization that was firmly predicated on the progressive nature of history as it attempted to erase pre-Christian traditions. Walter Benjamin has argued that ‘history is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now’.27 But in Synge’s Ireland this was not the case because of the influence of Catholic progressive history. Progressive history is empty because it is a highly conservative model of historical time that is essentially bottomless, since historical event after historical event can be stacked into it; this articulation of historical time is unaffected by the horror of history, accounting for progressive history’s homogeneity and its ruthless progressiveness; horrors of history will be forgotten as time progresses. However, this was not the case in Synge’s theatre of residual culture.
CATHOLIC MODERNITY
Catholic Ireland had worked hard to shake off the colonial stereotype that associated them with being backward believers in fairies, the quintessence of pre-Christian residual culture. Throughout the eighteenth century Ireland was subject to apartheid on religious grounds. Since the protestant Plantation of Ulster and the establishment of the Catholic penal laws at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the Irish Catholic was denied basic human rights. Catholic Ireland was not allowed to enter public office and members of the Catholic populace were fined if they failed to attend Protestant church services. At the apex of a huge social, economic and political divide in Irish life was the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. The Ascendancy was made up from the descendants of the Plantation of Ulster: a biopolitical strategy implemented by King James I that saw Scottish and English Protestants move to Ireland in order to strengthen Protestant culture. This class had ascended to being the dominant culture throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, pursuing a very esoteric, if slightly ironic, sense of style. Living in refined Georgian townhouses that overlooked their own private parks, the Ascendancy had all the
aura of the English nobility but they didn’t want to be defined by their English heritage. But it would define them. In 1801 the Act of Union was passed, which saw parliamentary proceedings transferred from Dublin to Westminster, London. The Irish House of Commons no longer had political governance over Ireland. The hegemony of Ascendancy dominant culture was rapidly declining as Catholic Ireland became enfranchised.
Catholic Ireland became enfranchised following Catholic Emancipation (1829) that broke the penal laws, the pact of the Repeal Association with the Liberal Party in Westminster (1840–48) and the Encumbered Estates Act (1849). These political events were concomitant with the horror of the Great Famine (1845–51) and later, the Land War (1870–82). What emerged from these collective events were huge expanses of land for a new generation of “strong” Catholic farmers; a class formation that had particular political clout because of the size of their land. Joseph Lee reminds us of the ‘alacrity with which Irish purchasers, urban and rural, bought encumbered estates in the 1850s to the value of £20,000,000 [which] pointed to the substantial reservoir of capital seeking outlets in landed property. Capital flowed into railways, gas companies, insurance and shipping firms, and bank shares’.28 During these decades of enfranchisement five of the twelve judges in the Irish Supreme Court were members of the Catholic bourgeoisie, while in other areas of commercial life the administrative power of the banks consolidated Catholic control as this mercantile class filtered the proceeds from the Encumbered Estates court into their monopolization of the Irish railway system.29 By the time Synge was born in 1871, the Ascendancy was radically marginalized if not altogether isolated. Archbishop of Dublin Cardinal Paul Cullen, whose devotional revolution30 attempted to erase the cultural vestiges of pre-Christian Ireland within the Catholic present because they were considered to be pre-modern and pre-political, neatly summarized socio-political conditions: ‘We are the Catholic population of the United Kingdom. A population growing every day in wealth and social importance.’31
Synge was born into an Anglo-Irish Ascendancy family of genteel poverty. Synge’s drama directly engages with a Catholic bourgeois class that the dramatist once defined as the ‘groggy-patriot-publican-general-shopman who is married to the priest’s half-sister and is second cousin onceremoved from the dispensary doctor’,32 a class that he felt to be replete with ‘fat-faced, sweaty-headed swine[s]’.33 As Shaun Richards suggests, this class exploited ‘the peasants it simultaneously idealised as the embodiment of authentic Ireland.’34 Sometimes Synge’s critique of the Catholic
bourgeoisie is implicit; with respect to suburban Dublin (where the majority of the Catholic bourgeoisie lived), to his close friend and confidante, Stephen MacKenna, Synge wrote: ‘Yes Dublin c’est le pays du rêve Celtique [is the country of the Celtic dream], but the realities are crude. The country round here is wonderful just now, but God help the people—the ‘nearDublin’ people surtout [mainly].’35 But at other times his critique of the Catholic bourgeoisie is explicit, especially after the infamous disturbances that greeted The Playboy of the Western World: ‘the scurrility and ignorance and treachery of some of the attacks upon me have rather disgusted me with the middle-class Irish Catholic.’36
Catholic Ireland considered pre-Christian beliefs to be pre-modern and pre-political because they were symptomatic of a consciousness that was recalcitrant to the logic of capitalist modernity, and capitalist modernity defined their material conditions of their dominant culture. The persistence of pre-Christian sensibilities did not necessarily trouble the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy because a Catholic peasant majority practiced preChristian beliefs. ‘Protestants have given, and continue to give’, wrote the Ascendancy advocate Horace Plunkett, ‘a fine example of thrift and industry to the rest of the nation’ whereas Irish Catholics were, in Plunkett’s opinion, ‘apathetic, thriftless, and almost non-industrial’.37 Residual sensibilities were problematical for Catholic modernity because they invited the contemporaneity of feudalism, uneven development and its concomitant “backward” economic and political logics. As Ireland embraced modernity and capitalism began to articulate the modes of production, a newly enfranchised Catholic bourgeoisie replicated the oppression of colonial rule through their strict codes of Roman orthodoxy, which understood political power and capitalist modernity to be codependent. The Catholic middle classes were becoming the dominant culture because of one key feature: progressivism, or, the ability to “change with the times”.
The leading proponents of Catholic progressivism in Synge’s Ireland were journalists: D.P. Moran, P.D. Kenny, W.P. Ryan, lawyer: M.J.F. McCarthy and clergyman Rev. M. O’Riordan. They all accepted the Catholic Church’s erasure of pre-Christian cultural residue. For some critics such as Moran, the Church was suitably progressive because it was suitably conservative. Moran lambasted those Protestants who thought ‘Catholics are superstitious and he believes in spooks himself; he thinks they are priest-ridden and he would like to go back to Paganism.’38 However, for others such as McCarthy, the Church was not progressive enough: ‘the potency of the priest implies a radical weakness in the national character;
but it is the priest’s interest to perpetuate that weakness and to foster it until it becomes a national imbecility.’39 Synge kept up to date with the debates over the progressiveness of the Catholic Church because these critics kept up to date with his work that critiqued the progressiveness of the Church. For example, Synge read the work of P.D. Kenny and furthermore, Kenny was invited to chair a debate on ‘The Freedom of the Theatre’ after the disturbances that greeted The Playboy of the Western World. 40 Moreover, W.P. Ryan discussed The Playboy of the Western World’s critique of Irish Catholic progressivism in his book The Pope’s Green Island where he concluded that Synge must have written the play after having taken ‘drink enough to bring him at once a relief from his suffering and a certain psychic intoxication.’41 If considered on a spectrum of Catholic progressivism Synge’s persuasion was extremely liberal, far more extreme than McCarthy and Kenny whose sentiments were relatively liberal. This is why Synge described himself as ‘a radical’,42 because he undercut the fulcrum upon which Catholic progressivism was finely balanced: progressive history.
Progressive history, Benjamin argued, ‘rightly culminates in universal history’43 and Synge’s plays identify those subterranean pasts that have been defeated in the name of progress so that history ‘involves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.’44 A positive identification of the discontents of historical time is conducive towards what Benjamin considers to be ‘a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past’.45 From this disjunctive cultural space, residual pre-Christian traces haunt modernity with the memory of its apparent defeat in the name of Catholic progressivism. Paul Murphy has correctly argued that what Synge is ‘really opposed to is a modernity based on the ethic of Catholic bourgeois nationalism’, but to suggest that the dramatist failed to offer ‘a credible alternative other than a fetishization of life on the peasant periphery’46 deserves reconsideration. Synge’s plays negate this supposition because if the residue from pre-Christian culture could be incorporated into hegemonic dialogue then a significant cultural materiality of the peasant periphery would cease to be peripheral.
Synge’s plays necessitate an alternative temporality of modernity because if objective time and capitalism are both marked by progressiveness and productivity, then Synge’s plays collapse time into a singular structure of past-present-future. Dominant culture, modernity and capitalism are inextricable and their influence on fin-de-siècle Irish religion and politics is acutely identifiable in the transition from orality to literacy.
At the beginning of the twentieth century Irish capitalist modernity was marked by the ability to literally document and record the divisions that progress and productivity made in the name of modernity. These divisions primarily concern the division of labour, class and religion, which are conducive towards the division of high and low culture and by degrees, dominant and residual culture. In this disjunctive cultural space pre-Christian sensibilities lurked. Alternative temporalities summon alternative histories. Synge’s pluralization of objective historical time occurs both on and offstage where the past discloses the present, so that the present can remember the future. David Lloyd has argued that, from the perspective of historical consciousness, ‘the oral signifies the pre-modern, the primordial, and is associated with myth and folklore, forms of consciousness that lack historical sense and imply the absence of a notion of change over time if not, indeed, an inveterate resistance to progress and development’.47 Synge’s alternative conception of modernity is one where oral culture lurks in the cracks and fissures of modernity’s insistence on literacy; a place and a space where that which resists historical documentation is named but unknowable. ‘Atavism expresses sentiment’48 Synge wrote in his notebook, and his plays placed the remote past firmly within the present where the emergence of residual culture created nostalgia. Nostalgia, from the Greek, nostos (return) and algos (pain), quite literally means the painful return. For some members of Catholic Ireland the painful return to a culture that they wanted to forget was far too great.
With respect to Catholic modernity, Lee argues that the Catholic Church ‘reflected the dominant economic values of post-famine rural society’, which privileged ‘the primacy of economic man over the Irish countryside’.49 Moran’s vision of Irish modernity was simple: profound economic growth with deep regard for the Church would ultimately be conducive towards national Independence. Pre-Christian beliefs, then, were deemed pre-modern and pre-political because they were seemingly unable to comprehend the institutional changes to economics and politics, which had been implemented with the transition to capitalism in the wake of the Great Famine.50 These institutional changes witnessed the Catholic Church display ‘an obsession with the materialists’ as Catholic society displaced ‘other worldly values’ in favour of ‘a very intense “this worldly” concern with social status’.51 The privileging of economic capital predicated Catholic modernity, which, in turn, ensured that Catholic modernity remained ‘politically pragmatic’ as it attempted to ‘foster a sense of national political consciousness’.52 But, as I’ve already mentioned,
the cultural residue from pre-Christian Ireland could not simply disappear, which is why it was perceived to inhabit the popular fantasy space as the consummation of idealism: the Celtic geist. Throughout the Gaelic Revival indiscriminate images of Celtic Ireland were created in order to summon Nationalist fervour. Pre-Christian residual culture got caught up in such a mythologizing process. Williams reminds us that,
in advanced capitalism, because of changes in the social character of labour, in the social character of communications, and in the social character of decision-making, the dominant culture reaches much further than ever before in capitalist society into hitherto ‘reserved’ or ‘resigned’ areas of experience and practice and meaning. The area of effective penetration of the dominant order into the whole social and cultural process is thus now significantly greater.53
A paradox ensues. Pre-Christian residual culture could be instrumental in the articulation of state-orientated Nationalism but if the pre-Christian idealistic fantasy of the Celtic geist materialized as pre-Christian reality then it was promptly removed from cultural hegemony because its apparent pre-political logic was problematical for the habitations of Catholic, bourgeois modernity.
What is significant about residual pre-Christian culture in fin-de-siècle Ireland is that as capitalism began to articulate Catholic modernity, members of the Irish populace still rationalized material conditions with pre-Christian sensibilities, which invited the contemporaneity of the premodern with the modern and the political with the pre-political. What emerges in this discrepancy between religious belief and political persuasion is the pluralization of modernity that demands a compete reconsideration of religion and politics. Material conditions in Ireland necessarily changed under the impact of capitalism but what remained was the dominance of capitalism without the hegemony of a capitalist culture. If political power and economic capital are treated as two separate categories then the category of the political has the potential to be insurgent towards Catholic modernity because it was no longer oppressive but productive. In distancing itself from pre-Christian sensibilities, Catholic modernity only succeeded in enfranchising the cultural residue as a political power that pluralized modernity through the constellation of the pre-modern and the modern. This is why Synge understood that pre-Christian beliefs could not be regulated to a pre-modern and pre-political consciousness;
just because these sensibilities invited the concomitance of pre-capitalist modernity, it did not necessarily follow that those that believed in supposedly pre-modern beliefs could not articulate their suppositions within the realm of the political. Ostensibly for Synge, pre-Christian sensibilities may have been a false consciousness, but it was a cultural articulation of a consciousness that precluded the institutional logic of Catholic, bourgeois modernity. At this juncture, the cultural practice of pre-Christian belief is in itself a political act that necessitates an alternative temporality of modernity where the pre-modern and the modern are no longer incommensurable but inextricable. As this book will suggest, Synge’s conception of an alternative modernity was caught within a critique of a newly enfranchised Catholic bourgeoisie, a critique that was problematic because of his alliance and sometime allegiance with the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy into which he was born.
SYNGE: THE POLITICAL PLAYWRIGHT
If this book seeks to demonstrate that Synge staged residual culture in order to critique the ideological hegemony of dominant Catholic culture, it is important to demonstrate Synge’s political mind and, significantly, what influenced his political persuasions. Yeats, however, was of the opinion that Synge was ‘unfitted to think a political thought’54 and he wasn’t the only one who thought this. After Synge’s death, Poet Laureate John Masefield would recall that Synge:
never played any part in politics: politics did not interest him. He was the only Irishman I have ever met who cared nothing for the political or religious issue […] his mind was untroubled […] He would have watched a political or religious riot with gravity, with pleasure in the spectacle, and malice for the folly.55
Synge’s first biographer, Maurice Bourgeois, would substantiate Masefield’s recollection: ‘Synge was a man of practically no opinions in an opinion-ridden country. Had he taken an interest in politics, it would have been the interest of the man who watches a dispute for the fun of the thing’.56 There is negligence in these comments and one need look no further than the letters of John Quinn who, just like Masefield, orbited the periphery of Synge’s life: ‘Synge was a keen observer of political conditions, although he never talked politics.’57 Synge was known to be reticent
on most topics, choosing to never comment directly on even his closest colleagues’ work.58 Even Masefield commented on Synge’s placid attitude at dinner parties as the dramatist ‘sat smoking, pushed back a little from the circle, gravely watching […] Sometimes I heard his deep, grave voice assenting “Ye-es, ye-es,” with meditative boredom.’59 Furthermore, Synge’s life-long best friend, Stephen MacKenna advocated that he would ‘die for the theory’ that Synge was intensely political ‘but one thing kept him quiet—he hated publicity, cooperation and lies. […] The lying that gathered round the political movement seemed to him to soil it utterly, and all that had part in it’.60 By his own admission, Synge was unable to ‘believe in trying to entice people by a sort of political atmosphere that has nothing to do with our real dramatic movement’.61 Nevertheless, Synge was a political playwright, interested in socialism.
Synge’s clearest admission of his socialist politics can be found in his 1896 notebook:
If we were to intentionally neglect the weak and helpless (for the good of the race) it could only be for a contingent benefit with an overwhelming present evil. Moral sense for regard for the approbation of our fallen depends on sympathy. J.M.S. a social instinct strengthened by habit.62
Synge wrote this shortly after studying socialism. In October 1896, Synge’s mother wrote a despairing letter to Synge’s younger brother Samuel, lamenting how ‘poor Johnnie’ had ‘gone back to Paris to study socialism’.63 In 1895 Synge had attended two lectures in Paris by the anarchist Sébastien Faure and now, returning to Paris, Synge was determined to tackle Marx’s Das Kapital and Marx and Engels’s The Communist Manifesto, all the while telling his mother that he was ‘not selfish or egotistical but quite the reverse’.64 Mrs Synge, however, was of a different persuasion: ‘In fact he writes the most utter folly—I was very unhappy all that evening and grieved greatly for him.’65 In 1895 Synge may have found Faure’s lectures ‘très interessant, mais fou [very interesting, but crazy]’66 but now he had returned to Paris, deciding to put his socialist conjectures into practice at a debating society.
In The Communist Manifesto Synge would have read how certain modes of production naturalize human consciousness in relation to their material conditions.67 Synge would have understood that this process can be evidenced throughout history through class struggle, as Marx and Engels suggested:
the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggle. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guildmaster and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary re-constitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes. […] The modern bourgeois society that has sprouted from the ruins of feudal society has not done away with class antagonisms. It has but established new classes, new conditions of oppression, new forms of struggle in place of the old ones.68
Marx and Engels would have impressed on Synge how the State under capitalism was simply ‘a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie’69 and how ‘the bourgeoisie, by the rapid development of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization’.70 Reading this in Parisian exile would have brought back uncanny reminders of the political reality at home and the unprecedented rise of the Catholic bourgeoisie and the establishment of their dominant culture.
Advocating the disestablishment of capitalism as the bourgeois mode of production, the socialism that Synge studied in Paris was predicated upon the abolishment of class conflict and the simplification of the economic base and cultural superstructure. The abolition of class conflict would ultimately bring the end of history because, as Marx and Engels suggested, the ‘bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instrument of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society’.71 This was Synge’s first critical encounter with ideology and consequently, he learned that all religion, be that pre-Christian, Catholic or even Protestantism is a lived false consciousness, according to Marx, which arises out of a human need to rationalize the real world and furthermore, that religions reinforce the status quo of socio-politics.
The more Synge read Marx the more he would have learned of Marx’s critique of religion and the importance of rearticulating the history from the perspective of materialism as opposed to idealism:
Man is no abstract being squatting outside of the world. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are inverted world […] Religious suffering is at one and the same time the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people […] It is therefore the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world […] Thus the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics 72
What Synge ostensibly took from Marx and Engels was the need to problematize the bourgeois mode of cultural production. He would do this by staging a pre-Christian cultural residue that escaped bourgeois capitalist thinking because it was considered to be pre-political and pre-modern. Synge’s philosophy of modernity was not defined by capitalism. What defined it was an interest in pre-modern and pre-capitalist logic and the culture of a class that Catholic bourgeois capitalism had suppressed in the name of modernity. Synge’s drama is political, then, because capitalist modernity is pluralized by its spectral double: pre-capitalist modernity. A rethinking of the relationship between economic base and cultural superstructure was needed if pre-Christian residual culture were to be privileged and the discrepancies in history, religion and politics in Catholic, bourgeois Ireland was to be arrested. Nevertheless, Synge stopped short of the social anarchism that Sébastien Faure’s Parisian lectures invited by excusing himself from Maud Gonne’s L’Association Irlandaise (Irish League) in April 1897, maintaining that his ‘theory of regeneration for Ireland differs from [hers]’.73 However, socialism had struck a chord with him; he was certainly proud to be ‘a radical’, which he defined as a ‘person who wants change root and branch’.74 Synge’s socialism, then, had to take a direction other than what he considered to be Gonne’s ‘plotting over tea-cups and cakes’75 and it would be channelled into aesthetics.
Right at the heart of Marxism is the extreme importance of humanity’s creative enterprise. Marx and Engels’ aesthetic consideration of socialism focussed on the efficacy of English novelists such as Charles Dickens who critiqued middle-class life as being ‘full of presumption, affectation, petty tyranny and ignorance’. Dickens welcomed how ‘the civilized world have confirmed their verdict with the damning epigram it has affixed to this class: “that they are servile to those above, and tyrannical to those beneath them’.76 Synge must have been encouraged by how literature could creatively critique the middle classes. Writing to his mother from Paris, the young man advocated that ‘Ireland will come to her own when socialist
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FLETCHER, JOSEPH SMITH. Talleyrand maxim.
il *$1.75 (2c) Knopf
20–627
Linford Pratt, a young lawyer, is inspired by Talleyrand’s maxim: “With time and patience the mulberry leaf is turned into satin.” He knew that wit and skill were his, and that time and patience, coupled with opportunity, would bring him the fortune he craved. He was not over nice about the opportunity. It came to him in the shape of a will whose existence no one suspected. It was to have been the first rung of the ladder by which he was to rise. Complications set in in the shape of an unknown witness of his theft, and wits as sharp as his. He must rid himself of the first by murder; he must extricate himself from the latter by blackmail, by fraud and intrigue and still another murder. But the net closes in about him till a bullet from his own weapon is his only means of escape. Side by side with this tale of horror goes a perfectly good romance between a good young man and a virtuous young woman.
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Springf’d Republican p11a Mr 14 ’20 340w
FLEURY,
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20–14392
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Bookm 52:78 S ’20 600w
Boston Transcript p8 O 2 ’20 1050w
Dial 70:107 Ja ’21 190w
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N Y Times 25:1 Jl 25 ’20 4650w
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The Times [London] Lit Sup p643 O 7 ’20 1950w FLEXNER, HORTENSE. Clouds and cobblestones. *$1.50 Houghton 811
20–19673
As the title indicates this collection of poems includes in its subjects everything contained in life between the clouds and the cobblestones: wide sympathies and interests and knowledge of men and their ways. The author employs both rhyme and meter and free verse. Among the titles are: If God had known; Children’s ward; Hunger; Masks; Longing; A sky-scraper; To a grasshopper; All souls’ night, 1917; Mammon redeemed; The sons of Icarus; Folk-dance class; Munitions; To Peter Pan; Blown leaves; A child; The masseuse.
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FLINT, LEON NELSON. Editorial: a study in effectiveness of writing. *$2.50 Appleton 070
20–20034
The author holds that, for all the truth that there may be in the saying: “the good editor is born not made,” the editor who has not thought out and applied a technique of his craft is “going it blind.” The book deals with methods of finding, gathering and handling editorial materials and with notions as to editorial responsibilities and opportunities. Contents: Development of the editorial column; Weakness and strength of the editorial; The editor and his readers; Materials for editorials; Editorial purposes; Building the editorial; The manner of saying it; Paragraphs and paragraphers; Typographical appearance; The editorial page; Editorial responsibility; The editor’s routine and reading; Analyzing editorials. The numerous illustrations consist of copies of specimen editorial pages and there is an index.
FLYNN, JOHN STEPHEN.[2] Influence of Puritanism on the political and religious thought of the English.
*$4 Dutton 285.9
20–22021
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J: P. Wisser
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FOERSTER, ROBERT FRANZ. Italian emigration of our times. (Harvard economic studies)
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20–103
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F. O. Beck
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FOLKS, HOMER. Human costs of the war. il
*$2.25 (2c) Harper 940.318
20–9641
While in charge of the American Red cross relief work in France, the author was impressed with the infinitesimal fraction of reality which found its way into print in the American papers. Towards the end of the war he was requested to make a survey of the needs of southern and southeastern Europe and to ascertain the net results of the war on human welfare. The book records his findings. It is not a constructive program he says, “simply a contribution toward a diagnosis which might make it possible to outline a well-considered course of treatment.” “Chapter I tells the origin of the survey ... and gives an account of the itinerary of the trips. Chapters II to VII, inclusive, deal respectively with Serbia, Belgium, France, Italy, and Greece. Chapters VIII to X endeavor to sum up the war ’ s results in all these countries, in the three vital aspects of childhood, home, and health. Chapter XI tries to fit the whole into a picture of war vs. welfare.” (Preface) There are an appendix and numerous illustrations.
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R of Rs 62:112 Jl ’20 100w
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FOOTNER,
HULBERT. Fur bringers. $1.90 McCann 20–8241
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“Very well written.”
“The story has plenty of incident, it moves quickly, and is told with a good deal of spirit.”
+ + Booklist 17:31 O ’20
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FORBES, GEORGE. Adventures
in southern seas: a tale of the sixteenth century. il *$1.75 (2c) Dodd
20–16854
A romance of the days of discovery based on the voyages of Dirk Hartog, Dutch navigator. The story is told by Peter Ecoores Van Bu who sailed on his first voyage with Hartog in 1616. They were bound for the South seas in search of treasure for the Amsterdam merchants who were sending them out. But the islands they reach are poor in treasure, if rich in adventure, and it is only after the lucky discovery of pearls that Hartog is willing to return. Several other voyages follow, on which the hero experiences ship wreck, capture by savages and numerous other adventures. At the end of his second voyage he marries his Dutch sweetheart and gives up the sea, but following her death he again listens to its call.
“The very spirit of high adventure the manifold dangers and hardships of ancient seekers after treasure—blows through the pages of the book.”
N Y Times p21 D 26 ’20 600w
FORBES,
JAMES. Famous Mrs Fair, and other plays. *$2 Doran 812
20–21209
The other two plays in this collection are: The chorus lady; and The show shop. Of these plays, Walter Prichard Eaton, in his introduction to the book, comparing their literary qualities, says, that “The chorus lady” can least endure the scrutiny print affords although enormously successful on the stage, while “The show shop” “stands up four square under the test of print” and is a most pungent and amusing satire of American stage life. “The famous Mrs Fair” is a more serious production with reasoned reflections on life and human motives. Its heroine, the wife of a wealthy business man, has become famous as a war worker in France. Coming home she is lionized, can no longer adjust herself to her domesticity and dreams of a career. Not until the family is nearly disrupted with tragic results does she, in the nick of time, wake up to her former responsibilities.
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FORBUSH, WILLIAM BYRON. Charactertraining of children. 2v il per ser of 7v *$15 Funk 173
19–13817
These books by Dr Forbush, author of “Child study and child training” and “The boy problem in the home,” are issued in the Literary Digest parents’ league series. Volume one is devoted to: Problems of government, with the subject matter divided as follows: Problems to be solved by means of the child’s own responsiveness; Problems to be solved largely through suggestion; Problems to be solved largely by substitution; Problems to be solved largely through cooperation. Volume 2 continues the discussion along these lines and takes up Problems of self-government and Problems of living with others. The series as a whole comprises three other volumes by Dr Forbush and two by Dr Louis Fisher on the health-care of children which are reprints of earlier works.
“These volumes, written in the clearest language of technical terms, well illustrated and interestingly arranged, should be a helpful and invaluable guide for those who have children to bring up or children’s problems to consider.”
FORBUSH, WILLIAM BYRON. Homeeducation of children.
(Literary
Digest parents’
league ser.) 2v il per ser of 7v *$15 Funk 372
19–14028
The first of these two volumes is devoted to the first six years of a child’s life and consists of two parts: Teaching a baby, and Teaching a little child. Volume 2 is devoted to: Teaching a school child (from six to twelve or fourteen); and The teaching of youth (from fourteen upward). Volume 1 has a list of story-and-picture books to use with the littlest children, also a list of books to help the mother in telling stories, and in volume 2 there is a chapter on Books in the home, with suggestions for reading.
FORBUSH, WILLIAM BYRON. Sex-education of children.
(Literary Digest parents’ league ser.) il per ser of 7v *$15 Funk 612.6
19–13816
“This book differs from others in the abundant literature that is being produced upon this topic, chiefly in the fact that it endeavors to present, with the least possible waste of space, all the material that parents of a growing family of children of both sexes need for their use at every stage of other children’s development. The unique feature, perhaps, is a section devoted to concrete answers to the embarrassing questions that children are likely to ask.” (Introd.)
Contents: Why we have to do this; How to educate the little child; How to educate the schoolboy; How to educate the schoolgirl; How
