3 - Shifts in perspective

Summary

‘Synge seemed by nature unfitted to think a political thought’, wrote Yeats in ‘J.M. Synge and the Ireland of his Time’. This statement has by now been frequently and convincingly contested. There is, to begin with, the biographical evidence of Synge's political actions and opinions, his interest in socialism in the 1890s, his reading of Marx and his ringing declaration to his nephew E.M. Stephens: ‘A radical is a person who wants change root and branch, and I'm proud to be a radical.’ There is the social criticism voiced in his articles for the Manchester Guardian on the Congested Districts which Yeats sought to suppress from Synge's posthumous Collected Works. Synge was nationalist enough to join Maud Gonne's militant Association Irlandaise in Paris in 1897, if only very briefly, and like many Irish nationalists he was fervently pro-Boer in the Boer War. Yeats's apolitical version of Synge has been challenged both by those who seek to uncover in his work a politics to be distrusted, and those who find in him a politics they admire. For Seamus Deane, for instance, Synge's cult of the heroic is politics by other means: ‘The attempt to recover a new ideal of heroism from the reintegration of the shattered Gaelic culture with the presiding English polity is no more than the after-image of authority on the Anglo-Irish retina.’