Sounding the Oirish: O'Brien versus Synge

Sounding the Oirish: O'Brien versus Synge

"Synge was perhaps the most monstrous phony and buffeon ever to enter our celtic toilet, but he won international fame and money because foreigners extracted strange meanings and nuances from the language he used."

Flann O'Brien was a writer obsessed with both nationhood and language, and saw the two as inextricably entwined. Nowhere was this more apparent than in his writings under the pseudonym of Myles na Gopaleen. One particular target of O'Brien's scorn was J. M. Synge's Playboy of the Western World. O'Brien felt that with the success of Synge's play, the stage-Irishman as he appeared in Dion Boucicault's works of the mid-1800s had become the prime symbol of Irishness (although, it may be argued, both Boucicault and Synge are putting forward a subversive version of the stage Irishman who had been a staple part of English drama for centuries). The main thrust of O'Brien's knife is this: "The set-up is this. These people turn angrily on the British and roar: 'How dare you insult us with your stage Irishman, a monkey-faced leering scoundrel in ragged knee-breeches and a tail coat, always drunk and threatening anybody in sight with his shillelagh? We can put together a far better stage Irishman ourselves, thank you. The Irish Stage Irishman is the best in the world.'"

The pig-in-the-kitchen image of Ireland was, as far as O'Brien was concerned, the main effect of the nationalistic firing of half-cocked muskets. Rather than subverting the English stage Irishman, Boucicault, Synge and their ilk merely augmented its dubious itinerary (I never said that the pro-subversion argument was a winning one). The crippling stroke O'Brien applies to Synge deals exclusively with language: "[T]he worst was Synge. Here we had a moneyed dilettante coming straight from Paris to study the peasants of Aran not knowing a syllable of their language, then coming back to pour forth a deluge of homemade jargon all over the Abbey stage ..." From such jargon has emerged such wondrous entertainments as Darby O'Gill and the Little People, The Quiet Man, and even the recent offerings Far and Away and Waking Ned (add to this truncated role of dishonour umpteen others, and don't forget that amadan in Braveheart). Although Synge may have had subversive intentions, the legacy such work has given us is not subversive at all. Instead it bedecks the politics of colonialism with praties, shillelaghs, and a bottle of the aul' poitin.