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 Irish-Catholic 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 In order to do this the book draws extensively on Synge’s unpublished diaries and notebooks to demonstrate how pre-Christian residual culture informed not just how he wrote, but also how he thought about an older, almost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 counter-hegemonic. 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 Wi...