Synge’s Aran

Abstract

Yeats’s advice to Synge at their meeting in Paris in 1896 is one of the best publicised facts of modern literary history. Sceptical critics, suspicious of recollection coloured by hindsight, have questioned the authenticity of Yeats’s account, but Synge himself let it stand in the Preface to The Well of the Saints, and in any case it hardly seems to matter whether the story is literally true. It is an appropriate myth. Yeats was an important influence on Synge’s career, and the visit to Aran was a momentous turning-point. No one is likely to quarrel with the statement from the Greene and Stephens biography: ’Synge’s visit to the Aran Islands in 1898 must be one of the most remarkable examples on record of how a sudden immersion in a new environment converted a man of ostensibly mediocre talent, a complete failure, in fact, into a writer of genius.’¹ But this change, though indeed astonishing, need not be regarded as an unaccountable miracle, a completely mysterious metamorphosis. We are in a position to look in detail at Synge’s own description of the visits in The Aran Islands and at the notebooks he used on Aran, to try to analyse the reasons for the dramatic flowering of talent. We can watch from unusually close quarters the nature of this creative stimulus and attempt to define in what ways Aran was significant for Synge.

Give up Paris. You will never create anything by reading Racine, and Arthur Symons will always be a better critic of French literature. Go to the Aran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves; express a life that has never found expression. (Plays I p. 63)