by Tim Robinson
There are other principles of exclusion at work too. A comparison of the contents of his notebooks and the finished work tells much about the rigour of Synge’s processes of composition. For instance, a much revised version of the passage about the spray on the leaves of the notebook itself, quoted above (p. 121), is found in a draft of The Aran Islands, but it does not occur in the finished work. As it in fact relates to the cliffs on the big island, this, like other omissions, seems to indicate that Synge wanted to truncate his account of the big island and hasten his definitive settling in Inis Meáin. This same passage in the draft is conflated with some inept nature-notes from the first notebook:
Everything in Aran has a certain rarity or distinction. Dandelion and buttercup here have yielded up their place to pansies with pale yellow lips, blackfooted maidenhair – to translate its [Gaelic] epithet – clings to the rock among the bracken and rooks and daws are replaced by these more graceful choughs.
Since dandelions and buttercups are glorious in the islands, the fern called in Irish the ‘black foot’ is not the maidenhair,25 etc., Synge’s final decision not to treat of the flora is wise; even his very general comment on it, ‘On these rocks, where there is no growth of animal or vegetable life, all the seasons are the same’, is depressingly unobservant – but then it is wafted into a magical and melancholy subjectivity by its conclusion: ‘and this June day is so full of autumn that I listen unconsciously for the rustle of dead leaves.’ Another entry in the first notebook not reflected in the final work is on Dún Aonghasa:
The antiquarian treasures of the islands are not strictly in the scope of my scattered notes and they have often been described. Some however possess such conspicuous individual beautiful that they come plainly beneath the impressionist. I have just visited Dun Angus a great primeval fortress placed with strong boldness on the edge of the highest cliff in Aran … The dull leaden grey of the evening though unlovely in itself was fitted to evoke the sense of absolute loneliness here at home. These races who raised the three great circles of concentric walls, what was their real feeling as they gazed in simple raiment from the cliff where I gazed?
In one of the later drafts this train of thought is continued:
My sadness and delight are older than the walls about me, and have lingered round these rocks since men were hairy and naked, for emotion is as inherent a property to this place as the colour or odour of the waves.
But the attempt at recuperating the emotions of hairy prehistory by means of the dubious metaphysics of their inherence in the rocks is abandoned, together with the description of the site. In fact Dún Aonghasa is one of the most striking absences in the book, and even the huge cashel lowering over Synge’s cottage in Inis Meáin is left undescribed except as ‘a corona of stone’.
Most visitors to the islands are as impressed by the great cashels as they are by the luxuriance of the summer flowers; but even before these perceptions they are overawed by the presence of stone everywhere. Synge certainly gives one the picture of a bare and stony island, but his account nowhere conveys the extreme stoniness of Inis Meáin, which is remarkable even in the context of the Aran Islands. Two aspects of this feature have been noted above: the sheets of smooth naked rock that extend for hundreds of yards in terraces below the line of villages, and the mighty stormbeach around the exposed southern shoreline and on top of the western cliffs. Synge does not mention these two astounding formations, which insistently raise the question of geological origins, of the processes of time; it is as if he wanted to generalize his island into elemental simplicity and atemporality. Similarly the striking out of Dún Aonghasa from his record amounts to the suppression of the islands’ history. Neither the rich corpus of legends and traditions associated with Aran’s saints and monasteries, nor the dramas of the Cromwellian conquest, nor the piteous hungerlore of the Famine century, figure in his account. The great echo-chambers of the past, from the geological birth through the prehistory and history of the islands, are closed off, almost down to the immediately relevant inheritance of landlordism. On the eve of the threatened evictions Synge asks, as if the question had just come into his head, who owns Inis Meáin; and the islanders’ answer places the matter in the perspectives of the picturesque: ‘Bedad, we always heard it belonged to Miss —, and she is dead.’ The islands, then, exist only in the shallow, cyclic time of sunsets and tides and seasons, the rippling weather-like time so accurately metered by Synge’s prose style itself. The pathos of this situation, its vulnerability, is expressed in the first of the notebooks, which so often spell out what is left implicit in the book itself:
The thought that this island will gradually yield to the ruthlessness of ‘progress’ is as the certainty that decaying age is moving always nearer the cheeks it is your extasy to kiss. How much of Ireland was formerly like this and how much of Ireland is today Anglicized and civilized and brutalized?
All that has happened to our world impends upon his island; the islanders are soon to be evicted from stasis and sent wandering on the roads of history.
Thus some of Synge’s omissions merely result from a decision not to be didactic or to waste time in acquiring the low grade omniscience other topographical writers aspire to, while certain themes broached in the notebooks lead him too far into the personal for exposure in the published work. But the grand exclusions mentioned above are definitive of the work itself, and to note them is not to criticize his creation but to situate it, to discover its co-ordinates, the negative ones as well as the positive, and to measure the richness of its austerity by the stringency of its rejections, the magnitude of the sacrifice of material (self-sacrifice, Synge being so at one with much of this material) necessary to carve it into the form it aspires to, which is island-like, extramundane. But what sort of truth does this drastic paring-away of reality leave to his claim in the introduction that he has written ‘a direct account of [his] life on the islands … changing nothing that is essential’? The life-currents that bring him repeatedly to the islands and carry him off again are virtually unrepresented in the book, which suggests that progressive, autobiographical time is as irrelevant as history to the truths he is conveying. And in listening for these truths, one has to be aware of variable distances between his islands and the Aran of our geographies, as well as between the visitor he projects on the islands and the Synge of the biographies. Synge the writer, for instance, had to put down thousands of words on that spray-encrusted paper while in Aran; the visitor’s mind retains the most complex sensations and intuitions in their pristine perfection.
The boat-trip to Inis Meáin from Cill Rónáin, that awkward compromise of Aran with the mainland, had given that visitor the ‘exquisite satisfaction’ of moving away from civilization in a canoe of a model that had ‘served primitive races since men first went on the sea’. The middle island is the real Aran, and its indubitable rock soon wears out his boots, so the islanders make him a pair of rawhide moccasins like their own in which he learns the ‘natural walk of man’. These initiations into the archaic, this casting off of modern life like a worn-out pair of boots, suggest that for Synge our civilization itself is merely something interposed, for the sake of false decency and craven comfort, between us and the harsh and beautiful truths of our world.
The visitor’s description of the interior of the cottage he is to lodge in is aglow with the colours of homecoming. He feels that the handmade articles of local materials not only ‘give this simple life, where all art is unknown, something of the artistic beauty of mediaeval life’, but seem to be ‘a natural link between the people and the world that is about them’. The islanders’ way of life, he notes, ‘has never been acted on by anything much more artificial than the nests and burrows of the creatures that live round them’. This action on them of the natural, though, is of a Darwinian ruthlessness; great dexterity is needed to bring a currach into land on a rocky shore through the breakers, and ‘this continual danger … has had considerable influence on the local character
, as the waves have made it impossible for clumsy, foolhardy, or timid men to live on these islands.’ It is particularly in Part 1 that Synge builds up this picture of a life lived hand in hand with nature, as, for instance, in his accurate observation of how the appearance of the village street changes with the wind’s direction, either all the south doors being open, or all the north doors, and so of how his hostess’s ability to judge the time depends on whether or not the sun is casting the shadow of the south door’s jamb on the kitchen floor. (How strange it is, that Synge’s first gift to his hosts on this island of elemental timekeeping was to be an alarm-clock!) And this sympathy between man and nature works both ways, the visitor is forced to believe, after witnessing a burial at which the thunder seems to join in the keening for the dead.
The visitor is not just an observer of the islands’ enviable naturalness, but a novitiate; he learns some of their sea-skills, their language. On his second visit he shows the islanders some photographs he took the previous year, and
a beautiful young woman I had spoken to a few times last year slipped in, and after a wonderfully simple and cordial speech of welcome, she sat down on the floor beside me to look on also. The complete absence of shyness or self-consciousness in most of these people gives them a peculiar charm, and when this young and beautiful woman leaned across my knees to look nearer at some photograph that pleased her, I felt more than ever the strange simplicity of the island life.
Synge’s second notebook goes further: ‘Another visit is over … One woman also has interested me in a way that binds me more than ever to the islands. The women are before convention and share many things with the women of Paris and London.’ During his first visit he had been reading Pierre Loti, arch-exponent of the temporary marriage both as a form of life and as a literary genre, and had noted for himself, apropos of Le mariage de Loti, ‘The wanderer has many pains that are known to wanderers only; in a score of places I also have longed to linger for my life and marry me with the woman that has mostly appeared to personify as a central life each new system of sensation.’ The personification of the island as a woman comes no doubt from the promptings of a young man’s blood as well as from the august precedents of Celtic myths in which the king marries the tutelary goddess of his realm. The notebook is more visceral than anything in the published text: ‘With this limestone Inishmaan … I am in love, and hear with galling jealousy of the various priests and scholars who have lived here before me. They have grown to me as former lovers of one’s mistress, horrible existences haunting with dreamed kisses the lips she presses to your own.’ By the end of his third season in Aran the visitor is telling the islanders that he is going back to Paris to sell his books and his bed (the elementary furnishings of his life), and then coming back to grow as strong and simple as they among the islands of the west. The next year, in self-ironizing counterpoint to his own romanticism, he also records the advice of the young men to him, that he should marry a fine, fat island girl who would have plenty of children and not be wasting his money on him.
But it is when alone, as he is for long hours, that the visitor enters into his own ecology of Being, finding his introspective way to that oneness with the natural world he divines in the island culture. He begins to understand the island nights and the distinction they lend to those who work by dark; he spends time by himself near the shore in darkness so absolute he cannot see or realize his own body and exists only in his hearing waves and smelling seaweed. He lies on the cliff-edge and experiences something of the revelation of inanimate vastitude Synge tried to express in his first notebook; he seems ‘to enter into the wild pastimes of the cliff, and to become a companion of the cormorants and crows’. (A draft for the Aran cliff episode goes further than this Wordsworthian empathy: ‘I fulfil a function like the litchen and the grass, and my thoughts are older than the stones about me’ – but this illumination is not developed.) And if he were to become part of this island universe, it would at the last treat him with dignity and accept him into its own element: ‘This death, with fresh sea salt in one’s teeth, would be better than most deaths one is likely to meet’ – a thought the first notebook elaborates into a painfully realistic prevision of the death that would face Synge himself: ‘to struggle in soiled sheets and thick stifling blankets with the smell of my own illness in my nostrils and a half paid death tender at my side till my long death battle will be fought out’.
Thus three identifications are being asserted: of the islanders with the island, of the visitor with the islanders, and of the island with the visitor. But none of these is without its painful contradictions, and Synge is true to those as well. Sometimes it is the Aran people who do not live up to the vision he has of them. The claim that the waves forbid the existence of clumsy or foolhardy men on the islands is undermined by the anecdote in Part 1 of a half-drunken crew rowing the visitor ‘at an absurd pace’ in a currach slowly filling with water from a leak which they had ‘with their usual carelessness’ neglected to mend. Often the Araners are distracted by the outside world from their island natures: ‘Yet it is only in the intonation of a few sentences or some old fragment of melody that I catch the real spirit of the island, for in general the men sit together and talk with endless iteration of the tides and fish, and of the price of kelp in Connemara.’ Synge could imagine better Aran men than these, and eventually he had to create his Araners of the mind, in Riders to the Sea. At the same time the visitor, in common humanity, cannot but listen sympathetically to the islanders’ economic problems. ‘The price of kelp in Connemara’, in particular, was to be a question of heart-rending importance for the Aran Islanders Synge depicted in his 1905 articles on ‘the distress’ in the Congested Districts, but for the visitor in Aran in 1898 such a question was only an interruption, part of the deplorable but inevitable intrusion of the mainland which was coercing and seducing the islands away from their essence. The most aggressive instance of this coercion is the eviction party of sweaty policemen who contrast so horribly with islanders as cool as seagulls; the most beguiling of the seductions is the shrill handbell calling the womenfolk to a meeting of the Gaelic League. The absurdity of applying mainland law to the seagull-islanders and of charging them rent for the rock they perch on is manifest; the teaching of written Irish is ominous, for it heralds the death of their oral culture and the clogging of their language with the dross of modern life.
But even if the outside world leaves them alone and uncorrupted, can the islanders really be at home in ‘a universe that wars on them with winds and seas’? In the last two sections of the book Synge describes repeated scenes of anguish over deaths by drowning, which evidently affected him deeply.26 The account in Part IV of the woman dying of typhus, while her menfolk row off into mist and wind in a vain quest for help, ends with the visitor talking with the old folk around the fireside about the sorrows of the people until late in the night. Coming from a funeral, he watches fishermen at work with a dragnet on the shore, and feels that they are all under a judgment of death on sea or land, and will all be battered naked on the rocks or buried with another such fearful scene in the graveyard as he has just witnessed. The islanders’ symbiotic pact with nature, then, leaves them helpless when it is broken, in the absence of civilization’s support.
The visitor’s own aspiration to oneness with the island community is problematic too. During his second stay he realizes how far away from him these people are: ‘They like me sometimes, and laugh at me sometimes, yet never know what I am doing.’ The cultural spaces between him and the islanders seem impassable: ‘They have the same emotions that I have, and the animals have, yet I cannot talk to them when there is much to say … On some days I feel this island as a perfect home and resting place; on other days I feel that I am a waif among the people.’ And (in Part IV) it is not just he himself with his insufficient Irish who is excluded, but the whole civilization that he was born into: ‘I became indescribably mournful, for I felt this little corner on the face of the world, and
the people who live in it, have a peace and dignity from which we are shut for ever.’ Similarly his attempts at direct communion with the island itself can lead him into dark moods:
After a few hours [of walking in the storm] the mind grows bewildered with the endless change and struggle of the sea, and an utter despondency replaces the first moment of exhilaration … The wind is terrific. If anything serious should happen to me I might die here and be nailed in my box, and shoved down into a wet crevice in the graveyard before any one could know it on the mainland.
Here is the bad death, grim alternative to the heroic sea-change he had proposed for himself as an Aran currach-man, during his first rhapsodic immersion in island life. From his early days in Inis Meáin the visitor records a striking dream, in which he is seduced into an ecstatic dance by music tuned to a forgotten scale, that becomes a vortex annihilating all outside itself and changes suddenly to shrieking agony. The dream hardly bears the theory it is burdened with: ‘Some dreams I have had in this cottage seem to give strength to the opinion that there is a psychic memory attached to certain places’ – which reads like a perfunctory nod to Yeats.27 Synge’s mind was too positivistic to entertain the mysticism of AE’s The Earth Breath either (and he confesses in the first notebook that he is too profane and sophisticated to see ‘the small gentry’ with which the islanders’ island is swarming at night). If this dream represents the blissful and deadly dance of union with nature, it also enacts the rebellion of the individual intelligence against such pantheistic self-obliteration.
