A Gallous Story or a Dirty Deed?: J. M. Synge and the Tragedy of Evasion

Abstract

On a short visit to Paris in March 1903, John Synge made the mistake of soliciting the young James Joyce’s opinion on a manuscript of Riders to the Sea. As Richard Ellmann notes, ‘No manuscript was ever read with less sympathy.’¹ In a penurious period for both men, material scarcity does not seem to have engendered professional magnanimity. The previous January Joyce had felt piqued by Yeats’s praise of Greek echoes in the play, territory over which he kept a jealous watch.² It was with some relish, then, that Joyce stripped the play of any lofty Hellenic pretensions: ‘I am glad to say’, he wrote to his brother Stanislaus, ‘that ever since I read it I have been riddling it mentally till it has [not] a sound spot. It is tragic about all the men that are drowned in the islands: but thanks be to God Synge is not an Aristotelian.’³ Citing Aristotle’s Poetics, Joyce insisted that the play, with its one-act brevity and emphasis on natural disaster, was just a tragic poem, not a tragedy. It was, he claimed, merely a ‘dwarf drama’.⁴ Richard Ellmann records that a disgruntled and unconvinced Synge found Joyce a stickler for rules and definitions.⁵ The same might be said of the Stephen Dedalus in the fifth chapter of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where, in the celebrated exchange with Lynch, he denies tragic stature to the girl killed in the hansom accident: ‘The reporter called it a tragic death. It is not. It is remote from terror and pity according to the terms of my definitions.’⁶ This scene has been interpreted as an example of the overly abstract and intellectualized Stephen, whose bloodless aesthetic theorization denies him the everyday reality and suffering which his nascent creativity so desperately needs.⁷

Et ton heritage? Mes têtes de mort te saluent. My compliments to the little Irish pigs that eat filth all their lives that you may prosper.

— When the Moon Has Set